The cranky spirituality of a postmodern Gal.
Emerging church ala Luther.

House for All Sinners and Saints

House for All Sinners and SaintsI am the mission developer for House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. We are an urban liturgical community with a progressive yet deeply rooted theological imagination. Check out our site for more info.

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books and magazines i dig

Nadia Bolz-Weber (that's me!): Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian TelevisionHere's my book. You should buy it.

Kester Brewin: Signs of EmergenceThis book is tremendous. Drawing on his background as a math teacher, Brewin explores why the church is where it is and why it is to change...using complexity theory. This is a must read.

But the hour is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

The story of the woman at the well is the longest recorded conversation with an individual that Jesus had in any of the gospel accounts. And isn’t it really just like Jesus to linger in public talking to a half-breed divorcee? She walks up and in the unforgiving light of a noon sun Jesus just sits there for everyone to see languishing in conversation with a discarded woman. Much has been made of the outsider status of this person Jesus talks to the longest… she’s a woman and a Samaratin but she might as well be a homeless trannie with bad teeth or An Enron executive, or a meth-addict, or Ann Coulter, or the guy who bullied me in High School. The point being that Jesus just sits there chatting it up with whoever we wish he’d have the good taste to dislike as much as we do. I’m sure there were important things to do, important people to see but he just seems to have no concept of time. I imagine his disciples were beyond irritated – they kept butting in tapping their watches Um…Jesus? It’s lunch time. And Jesus just sits there talking with her as though he’s got all day.

She’s carrying more than a jar with her. The woman at the well. As she walks up to the well at the noon of the day…hours after the respected and respectable women of her village have already come and gone she walks up burdened by a water bucket and a story. The text is silent on why she has had 5 husbands, the church has always assumed she is a floozy but she very well may have simply been discarded, widowed, abandonded or maybe some combination of all these things, but the point is…I’m willing to bet that her past whether it be as victim or vixen is connected to why she’s at the well at noon and not at sunrise with the other women.

She’s come for water but she carries with her a jar and a story.

There’s this thing about this passage which has always baffled me. It’s toward the end…she has a conversation in which Jesus lets on that he knows she’s had 5 husbands and the man she lives with now is not her husband and she runs back to her village saying come and see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done... as though that’s a good thing. I, for one, would very much not enjoy having someone tell me everything I’d ever done; other than sounding really time consuming, there are things I really don’t want to be reminded of. So then why would Jesus telling her everything she had done lead her to believing he might be the messiah? Here’s the thing: I think there’s more to it than Wow this Jesus is a great psychic soothsayer fortune teller guy. I think it had to have been more than the fact that he told her what she’d done. I think it had to have been the way in which he told her what she’d done without implying that what she’d done defines who she is.

Perhaps standing there in the stark and unforgiving light of the noon sun she came carrying more than a water jug. She came carrying her past as a mark of identity thinking and being treated as though she is nothing more than the sum total of her mistakes or the sum total of her victimization. And taking his sweet time Jesus says yes. what you have done and what you have left undone and what has been done to you and what has been left undone to you has really happened, yes, it’s true. And it is not who you are. And in that moment suddenly the distance between how others see her and how God sees her disappears.

She came carrying more than a water jug in the stark light of a noon sun, she came carrying the past as a shackle and the future as the key. She knew the future was the time in which the messiah would come and make everything right, a time some time out there when the Christ will be revealed. And Jesus says to her I am he. Jesus speaks to her the truth of who she is by speaking to her the truth of who God is. Jesus says to her now is the time in which God seeks you in the very truth of who you are in this, the present moment.

In today’s gospel Jesus says the hour is here for us to worship God in truth and God seeks such as these. The hour is indeed here in which God is seeking you in truth…the truth of who you are not the regrets of who you were, not the ideal or the promise of who you might become – God is seeking you now in the truth of who you are.

There is a crass but true saying in Alcoholics Anonymous: “When you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future you’re basically pissing on the present” How often are we not present to others, not present to ourselves and not present to God in the moment because of regret, nostalgia, and worry. We too allow ourselves to be so absorbed with either the hurt or the glory of the past or we allow ourselves to be so absorbed with either the fear or hope of the future that we miss the only thing that is real which is the sacrament of the present moment.

I love the way Paul in his epistles uses the word “now”. In his letter to the church in Corinth he writes: For God says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” See, Paul writes, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! I just don’t think that when Paul says Now he meant that one moment in time 2,000 years ago when he penned the letter. I think he meant the NOW. The present moment continues to be the “acceptable time” in which God is present to you in the truth of who you are. In other words, Ram Dass didn’t invent that whole Be Here Now thing.

So, if the Samaratin woman at the well did come burdened with more than her water jar, then I think verse 28 is pretty great – it goes like this: -then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

I guess that’s what I wish for you. That you know how known you are. That you are filled with the love of a God who knows you and loves you…that you are so filled with the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the present moment that you leave your water jug or whatever it is you think you came here for …leave it here at this table where God is seeking you in the truth of who you are.

You may be here this evening and feel like nobody could ever love you, if they knew who your really are. But the good news is that God knows it all, God’s seen it all, and God loves you. May you leave behind whatever it is you think you came here for and instead be filled with the truth of this present moment, the truth that there is quite enough of God’s love for everyone, because God sees you through the indiscriminate eyes of Jesus.

(my thanks to Rev. Paul Fromberg for letting me steal the last 3 sentences of this sermon)

Here’s a name for you: Rollen Stewart. Born Feb 19th, 1944. Ring a bell? You probably know who he is you just don’t know his name although it’s not like you’re gonna run into the guy at Starbucks or anything since he’s serving 3 consecutive life sentences on kidnapping charges in a California penitentiary. His other claims to fame include being Married 4 times, being jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Summer Olympics, and stink bombing Trinity Broadcasting Network. And most recently Rollen Stewart is known for coming in #1 for most common response on my Facebook wall when I posted the question when you hear or read the words “John 3:16” what does it make you think or feel or remember? You see, Rollen Stewart is the wacky rainbow wig guy who is famous for holding up John 3:16 signs at big sporting events. And while I don’t have the data to back up this claim I’m willing to bet that his antics didn’t win a whole lot of so-called unbelievers over to Jesus.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Here’s the thing: I got 47 answers to my question what does the term “John 3:16” make you think about and while a lot of folks answered “rainbow wig guy at football games” what was more heartbreaking than that is how many negative reactions people have to this verse. Here’s a sample:

John 3:16 is a message of exclusion – as in we are the ones who will be saved – clearly not you, another person said :The way some Christians talk, God has it out for the world, and another: this verse is thrown in people's face in a violent-feeling manner; as if aggression will get someone to believe, and finally My friend Brad just simply said that John 3:16 makes him think of Weirdos and Violence.

Wierdos and violence. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. What have we done? As this season of Lent calls us to confession and repentance I’d like to take this opportunity to confess what the church has done to make people think so negatively about John 3:16. Because when did a verse about the extravagant and self-giving love of God become about exclusion and violence? When? well basically as soon as it was heard by sinners. And here’s why: Pastor Barb Martens once put it like this: for some people the good news is that there is an in group and an out group and for others the good news is that there is no longer an out group. In other words, the fact that this love of God in Christ is truly for me is not enough – I must – and let’s be honest, the church feels it must- then add to the gospel. And what the church will add every time is an exclusion clause. For God so loved – us but not them, For God so loved Christians but not Muslims, for God so loved America but not Iraq. I wonder if we think that this story of a world-redeeming, self-emptying, life-giving, faith-creating, people-loving God is not good enough news unless it excludes someone else? And let’s be honest, the best way to exclude someone else is to make the entire God-loving-the-world thing not about God’s extravagant Love, but about our belief. Then see, the ball is in the church’s court and when it becomes about belief then we have a situation in which we can determine what exactly is the right kind of belief, the right style of belief and the right amount of belief and viola! we have ourselves an in group and an out group. An in-group who has seen fit to offer our gift of belief or pure doctrine or morality to God in exchange for Love. And then, see, we deserve to be the in group and those who did not offer these things in exchange for God’s love clearly deserves to be the out group. They had their chance and they blew it.

There’s no better example of this than when the church decides who deserves to take communion. When we set up boundaries around Christ’s table we treat it more like our table. As though to say The fact that this is the body of Christ broken for me and the blood of Christ shed for me is not enough unless I know and preferable can determine who it is not for.

I confess to you that the church can turn the good news of God’s love into something that makes people think of weirdos and violence by adding our made up requirements to it - but it can also happen by taking things away. Because the John 3:16 verse is modified and given a whole other meaning by what comes before it and what comes after it. Listen to John 3:15-17

the Son of Man will be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

16For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The world is saved through Christ Crucified and lifted up…that the world might be drawn into relationship with the true nature of God. The nature of God revealed in a rough hewn cradle and cross. Based on people’s reaction to John 3:16 I suggest that maybe what this has been made into instead is this: Christ came to condemn the world but some of the world might be saved through our belief.

But what I learned at Lutheran seminary is this: Christian Faith is simply not a if…then….proposition. If you believe then you will be saved, It is a Because…therefore proposition. Because God loved the whole world therefore God came to us in Christ so that there would no longer be any confusion about the matter. Because God loves the world, therefore we are free to do the same. Because God loves the world and God creates faith in us therefore we are free to believe. In other words, belief is not what we offer God in exchange for God’s love, belief is what is created in us by the Holy Spirit when we have an encounter with the Word of God - be it the Word made flesh in Jesus high and lifted up on the cross given for us in bread and wine or when we have an encounter with the proclaimed Word of God and forgiveness of sins.

God has claimed you in this story. God has swept you up into God’s redemptive love for the whole world and there is nothing for you to add: no amount of belief, no giving up of sweets during Lent, no good works nothing. Because God loves the world, God came and was made human, ate with sinners and bureaucrats, died an innocent death and was lifted up on a cross, so that all might believe in God –therefore there is no exclusion clause to be added to God’s love - therefore you can trust that this is a God for you and with you and there is nothing you can add to that and nothing that can be taken away from that. And if this story of who God is in Christ makes any sense to you at all cling to it - but if the church has instead given you the weird and violent message that Christ came to condemn the world but some of the world might be saved through our belief then forgive us our sins as God forgives all those who sin against him.

Sometimes when I’m bored I kinda like to fill in sound effects that I think the crowd listening to Jesus might have responded with. He takes familiar passages And says “you have heard this (and everyones like “yeah!) and then he goes but I say this” (and everyone’s like booo) he does this with messianic authority several times in the Sermon on the Mount like in today’s reading when he says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ (and everyones like “yeah!)39But I say to you, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; (and everyone’s like boo!)

Jesus takes the part of the law of Moses which prevented disproportional punishment…. the let the punishment fit the crime statute found in Exodus 21 and turns it on it’s head like Jesus loves to do. OK, fair enough.

But then the next part says this.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

So where exactly is it is written you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemies? That’s just not found in the Torah. I searched for it…it’s not there, sure the love your neighbor thing is in the old testament but hate your enemy? good luck , it’s like trying to look for “God helps those who help themselves” It’s simply not in the Bible. But then I realized why love your neighbor and hate your enemy sounds so familiar …. ‘cause, it might not be in the Bible, but I’m pretty sure it’s in my heart. It’s like, in our DNA. So if you’re trying to find where Love your neighbor and hate your enemy is found don’t look in the old testament…look here. When I realized this it felt like a bad horror movie “the phone call is coming from inside the house” See In my heart I want to savor my anger and resentments. I mean you may be able to turn them into love but my anger and hatred is special. It’s justified and if I can get other people to hate the people I hate then all the better. Knowing why each of my enemies clearly deserves to be hated is like a big delicious meal, until I realize I’m the main course. Because hatred is simply a corrosive form of spiritual bondage. So Jesus says Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.

Now before we go on let me say this: loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you is not the same as saying that it’s ok that someone has caused you emotional, spiritual or physical harm. I don’t think Jesus is saying that we should dismiss, discount or diminish the very real harm done to us by damaged people.

So when Jesus says love your enemies I just don’t think he means try and muster up a positive emotional feeling about despicable people. Loving those who persecute you is simply not the same as saying you should feel affection toward the people who have hurt you, or that you should feel fondness for people who are mean to you at work. I just don’t think this about our feelings. Because the Greek word Jesus uses when he tells us to love our enemies is Agape and Agape love simply isn’t about what we feel in our hearts. It’s not a sentiment. I actually don’t think it has to do with feelings at all…agape is the love that’s only possible through the indwelling of God’s spirit.

And I don’t think he means think nice thoughts even. Remember when your mom made you apologize to your brother or sister and you just kind of phoned it in “sorry.” and she was like “say it like you mean it…it doesn’t count if you don’t mean it” Yeah…this isn’t like that. I think loving our enemies might be too central to the gospel…too close to the heart of Jesus for it to wait until we mean it. I don’t mean it. And my heart, remember… the very place where I found that impulse that I am to love my neighbor and hate my enemy isn’t going to purify itself. So if God is waiting for that same heart to feel nice loving warm pink fuzzy things about someone who is my enemy well, I think God might be waiting awhile.

So if it’s not a feeling we try really really hard to create in our own hearts maybe Agape-ing… loving our enemies is actually an action. Because given the choice between feeling the thing and doing the thing I think the doing of the thing that is what’s critical here. And maybe “really meaning it” is not the prerequisite to just doing it and maybe the action we take is simply this: you pray for those who persecute you. Commend them to God. You don’t have to feel affection for them…just hand em over. Because this counter-intuitive act of enemy love requires prayer. It doesn’t require the right feelings of niceness or generosity, It requires that we commend our enemies to the one who has perfected the love of enemy. It requires being in the prayerful presence of a God who was killed by God’s enemies and then rather than retaliation, rather than violence, rather than an eye for an eye God used that same death to be the very thing that ends up being the source of their salvation.

So maybe when Jesus says to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you it’s not so that you can be good. It’s so you can be free. this freedom from the corrosive distortions of hatred this freedom from having to protect our selves and prove ourselves and preserve our rightness. Well, this is the freedom of the Gospel. This is the freedom of a God who loves God’s own enemies enough to die for them.

I’ll end with a story about how you just never know when God might make your enemy your friend. A man named Chris Roseborough hosts a conservative Christian talk radio show called Pirate Christian Radio. And a couple months after he had spent 2 of his shows talking about me and how I am disobeying God by being a female pastor and how I’m a heretic because I have gay folks in my church and well, you get the idea. Well a couple months after this he showed up to a conference I was speaking at in the Twin Cities. Now you should know something about me. My first response to almost everything is screw you. Now I almost never stay there but I almost always start there. God usually pretty quickly moves me to something a little more gracious but that doesn’t change my wiring. I’m a fighter. So when I heard he was there I went into a little mini rage screw that guy he shouldn’t even be here, don’t show me who he is I’m not talking to him. Clearly he was my enemy. But the next day a middle aged guy with a beer gut and a bad goatee walks up to me after I had spoken extends his hand and says “Hi. I’m Chris…” I swallowed hard, extended my hand said a quick “help me” prayer and we proceeded to have a conversation about our need for God’s grace and forgiveness of sins and the Eucharist. A conversation in which he cried twice. At the end I said “Chris, I have 2 things to say to you. 1. You are a beautiful child of God and 2. I think you and I were desperate enough to hear the gospel today that we might even hear it from each other. Now Chris calls me about every couple months and we talk for like an hour. He hasn’t written about me or talked about me on his radio show and he’s gotten in a lot of trouble form his followers for calling me his friend. Now…did this happen because I managed to make my heart feel really nice warm fuzzy feelings toward him? clearly not. I can’t stand the guy. This was a loving-my-enemy that only could flow from the heart of a forgiving God. The same God who in the book of Ezekial says I your God will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I your God will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Last week one of you told me about a friend of yours who, when her young brother died tragically, her church said irretrievably stupid things to her like “it must have been God’s will” as though that is a comfort, as though pawning suffering off on God is doing anybody any favors whatsoever. To be honest, and call me a heretic, but this is a concept in theology that’s always bugged me. It’s called “the sovereignty of God” it’s the idea that everything that happens happens because it’s the will of God. Everything. The problem is that this idea of God’s sovereignty seems to most often come up when something awful has happened. So when someone is grieving the death of their child or is facing untreatable cancer and the church makes the claim that God is controlling and even willing all of this to take place seems to just a) make people feel worse and b) make God seem like a heartless bastard. And I am just gonna go out on a limb here and claim that maybe making suffering people feel worse and making God out to be a heartless bastard is not what the church is supposed to be doing.

Anyhow, I bring this up because I started wondering about why God’s sovereignty is never brought up when we talk about the beatitudes. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn…why do we play the It’sGod’s will card when it comes to suffering but never when it comes to blessing? Why don’t we ever make big cosmic claims about God controlling everything that happens when it comes to the way in which God insists on blessing that which the world deems undesireable?

One reason is maybe because I think it can be easy to view the sermon on the mount as pure exhortation. It can be easy to view the beatitudes as Jesus’ command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer and mournier so that we might be blessed in the eyes of God.

But what if the beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try and meet to be blessed. What if Jesus saying blessed are the meek is not instructive –what if it’s performative? meaning the pronouncement of blessing is actually what confers the blessing itself. Maybe the sermon on the mount is all about Jesus’ seemingly lavish blessing of the world around him especially that which society doesn’t seem to have much time for, people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance. So maybe Jesus is actually just blessing people, especially the people who never seem to receive blessings otherwise. I mean, come on, doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do? Extravagantly throwing around blessings as though they grew on trees?

So I began to think this week about what our relationship to receiving and giving blessings might be if it’s the giving of a blessing itself, and not the ability to meet the conditions of receiving a blessing that make the receiver blessed

It’s a pretty Lutheran idea really, this whole because of not in order to thing. You see, you live lives worthy of the gospel because you have received grace upon grace. You don’t live lives worthy of the gospel in order to receive this grace.

It’s a pretty critical distinction, but the hard thing about looking at it this way is that for some of us it can be easier to try and meet the conditions of receiving a blessing that to simply receive a blessing.

A couple years ago I experienced this weird thing where old ladies kept blessing me in ways that felt super awkward. Walking off the stage after I spoke at an event at St. Mary’s cathedral in Memphis, a British woman in her 70s walks straight toward me and in front of God and everybody, embraces me. Not a friendly “thank-you” hug, but it was like embracing-with-the-intent-to-bless.

I had just read aloud an essay about my call to ministry; how it involved stand-up comedy and suicide and AA and pornography strangely and it was about seeing the gospel from the underside of our lives. And now before I know what was happening some proper old Brittish lady is blessing me. Red cardigan covered arms enfold me as this stranger whispers in my ear “God has given you something.” She kisses my cheek not breaking the embrace even a little: “Jesus walks with you.” Again she kisses me. Again she whispers a blessing but always she keeps embracing me. Me. A heavily tattooed Lutheran who swears like a truck driver. I don’t feel worthy of any of this But it feels like God’s own self blessing me with warm breath and a scratchy sweater.

When I sit back down I think, “What the hell just happened?” My friend Sara, having seen the interaction, slides into the pew next to me saying, “Girl, you gotta just submit and let people bless you.”

It’s hard though. But she’s right. we need to let people bless us. Maybe letting ourselves receive blessings is part of the Christian life. It’s just not one that people talk about much because we’re so busy worrying about what we should be doing for others.

A week or so after the scratchy red cardigan old lady blessed me…again just as I finish preaching at Church of the Beloved in Edmonds, Washington, it happens again. Almost exactly like the last time, only this time it’s a Franciscan nun in her long brown habit. With a hand on each of my shoulders, she looks me in the eye without a hope of me turning away. “You have been blessed.” She chokes up and embraces me.

I think looking back that maybe God had somehow caught on to the fact that 70-year-old women are the only people whose blessings even I can’t resist.

So if we have a God who, out of God’s sovereignty blesses the poor the hurting, the peace making and the meek then I wonder what a Church might look like that submits to these blessings offered us by God. Perhaps you yourselves have your own version of old ladies with scratchy sweaters who are bringing you God’s own blessings. Look for them this week perhaps in the form of a text message or love from a pet or someone who lets you in front on them on I-25 or a smile from the homeless guy you just handed a dollar. Submit to these blessings brothers and sisters. Because God is a God who blesses in order that we might be blessed in order that we too might bless.

So if there is something we take away perhaps it is not to try and fulfill the conditions of receiving God’s blessing, but perhaps being God’s people is being a people who, like God, bless the world around us not on the basis of the world’s values but on the basis of God’s values. So I say let’s just make up excuses to bless people and places and things because it just seems so Jesusy and kind of fun and I’m pretty sure that human blessing and NOT human suffering is “God’s will”.

At the Baptism of our Lord heaven simply could not contain God the Father and God the Spirit who interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to bring a very important message. That message is that this Jesus who just moments ago was standing in line with all the other rif-raf, this Jesus who has just been baptized is the Son of God, the beloved in whom God is well pleased to offer to the whole world. That was God’s first move. From this place of identity Jesus was then equipped for his purpose. Check out the next few verses:

And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 3The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

And the Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased. Identity. It’s God’s first move.

I was reminded this week by my friend Dave Lose that when The Devil says to Jesus "If you are the Son of God...." he calls into question Jesus' relationship with his Father because he knows that Jesus, as with Adam and Eve before him, is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that his is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.”

So perhaps there’s a reason why when Jesus was baptized and given an identity and purpose from God that the devil’s first move was putting this very identity and purpose into question saying If you really are what God says you are… Identity. … It’s like the end of the spool of thread that when gotten ahold of can unwind the whole thing.

I wonder if we too are vulnerable to temptation: whether it be temptation to self-loathing, or self-agrandisment; depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence….I wonder if we too are prone to these temptations precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from and relationship to God. We are vulnerable to darkness precisely to the degree in which we doubt the identity and purpose given us by God on the waters of our baptism.

For the record, I have very little predilection for thinking about demons or the devil or that whole powers and principalities thing. Like a good middle class mainline protestant, I tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at all of it as superstitious snake handling nonsense. As though it’s all the spiritual equivalent of a Monster Truck Rally. At best I think all that talk about demonic forces is no more than a result of ignorance and lack of education. At worst it’s just a way to externalize our own sin. Because if the Devil made me do then I don’t have to face the reality that perhaps I made me do. It’s all so ripe for abuse…. some in this room have been victim to other Christians trying to cast out the so-called demon of homosexuality as though spiritual warfare and the culture wars are one in the same thing.

So I hope you hear me when I say, I in no way have any desire to believe in spiritual warfare yet in the last couple years I’ve quietly began to change my ideas about this. Based on the Biblical text and my own experience, I now think that there are indeed forces that seek to defy God in the world and that this is demonstrated not only in the evil we see swirling around us in the world – demonstrated not only in the bullets which flew from a legal handgun in Tuscon yesterday into the head of a US congresswoman.. bullets that killed a 9 year old girl and 4 others. That sort of defiance of God’s love and purpose for humanity is obvious. But I think that in more subtle ways these same forces also can seek to defy God’s purpose in our own individual lives… and in our Christian communities. And the first move of the devil is always the same. Attack your identity as the beloved with whom God is well pleased. And the precision by which the Devil, or evil or darkness (what ever you want to call it) worms into our own lives in just this way is breathtaking. Like a radioactive isotope custom made for each of us calling into question our identity as children of God.

The longer I try to participate in God’s redeeming work in the world the more I am convinced despite my proclivity to cynisicm that there are indeed forces that seek to defy God. And nowhere are we more prone to encroaching darkness than when we are stepping into the light. If you have ever experienced sudden discouragement in the midst of healthy decisions, or if there is a toxic thought that will always send you spiraling down or if there is a particular temptation that is your weakness then I make the following suggestion: take a note from Martin Luther’s playbook and defiantly shout back at this darkness “I am Baptized” not I WAS but I AM baptized. When Luther himself was hold up in a castle translating the Greek Bible into German so that for the very fist time somewhat regular folks could read the Word of God for themselves, well, while he was doing this he struggled mightily with doubt and discouragement from what he understood to be the devil. And he was known to not only throw the occasional ink pots at whatever was tormenting him and causing him to doubt God’s promises, but while doing so he could be heard throughout the castle grounds shouting “I am baptized”.

Lutheran Theologian Craig Koester says that From an earthly perspective, evil can seem so pervasive as to be unstoppable. And watching the evening news would seem to support that idea. But from a heavenly perspective evil rages on earth not because it is so powerful, but because it is so vulnerable. Koester claims that Satan rages on earth because he has already lost and he is desperate” So if you are going to join me in this crazy practice of picturing our discouragement and doubt as a force that wants to defy God then join me in picturing it not as powerful and unstoppable but picture evil and darkness for what it is: desperate and vulnerable…. because a light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, will not can not overcome it

And when the forces that seek to defy God whisper IF in your ear….if God really loved you you wouldn’t feel like this…If you really are beloved then you should have everything you want … Remember that you, all of you, have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit in your. God has named you and claimed you as God’s own in the waters of your baptism. You, like our Lord, have been given identity and purpose, so when what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life and then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it “I am baptized” because the water that covered you in God’s promises in your baptism is simply the only thing that gets to tell you who you are.

And this is not a matter of having high self-esteem. This is about nothing less than God’s redeeming purpose in the world and that purpose will prevail. Indeed has already prevailed. Amen.

I have a pastor friend who collects a lot of crèche scenes. He especially likes really bad ones. My favorite is a certain one which has all the regular elements one might expect: Mary the God bearer, Joseph her protector, the shepherds, a donkey and some sheep and there kneeling at the side of the Christ child is a wise man. But not one from the East like in today’s gospel reading….but one from the North. As in the North Pole. In this crèche scene none other than Santa Claus himself knees at the manger. You’d think that would be enough irony but no. It gets better. Also in the same manger scene with Santa Claus right next to the sheep and donkey…was a pig. Yes, nothing says Biblical illiteracy like depicting swine at the birth of our very Jewish Lord. But that’s what happens when we are familiar with stories without actually knowing them.

I wonder how well we really know these stories, like the wise men of which are so familiar. For instance, if we asked 100 people the following: who brought gifts to the Christ child, how many people were there, where were the people from and where did they bring their gifts to…inevitably people would respond: 3 kings from the orient brought the baby Jesus gifts in the manger. And everyone around would likely nod their heads and say “yep. that sounds right” 3 kings form the orient bringing gifts to Jesus in a manger is a charming story but it’s not actually the one we find in the Bible…it’s the one we find in the insufferable song “We Three Kings of Orient are”

A closer reading of the text results in the realization that we have no idea how many there were, we don’t know how far east they came from, was it the Orient … was it Aurora? When they found the child they entered not a stable or a barn with a manger but a house and most importantly…and I kind of hate to break to you…they were definitely not kings. They were Magi. as in ..Magicians… and not the cute kind you hire for you kid’s birthday party either. They were opportunistic, pagan, soothsaying, tarot card reading, astrologers. Yet we made them and remember them to be kings.

On some level we like the idea of kings bowing down before the Christ child. We’ve made them kings because the reality that they were magicians is too distasteful. No one wants the weird fortune teller lady from the circus with her scarves and crystal balls to be the first to discover the birth of our Lord. So we nicen it up a bit to an idealized picture of multi-cultural diplomacy.

But they aren’t fereign kings, they were magi and In case you think I’m putting too fine a point on this listen to St Paul’s description of a Magi he and Barnabus met up with in the 13th chapter of Acts

You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery.

Can you imagine him following this up with “and what was it like when you followed the star to the Christ child?”

Picturing oriental kings at the birth of our Lord is preferable to picturing soothsayers and astrologers and tarot card readers kneeling before the Christ child. But it was magicians following a star, a light in the dark of the sky which led unlikely pagans to the light which is come into the world. That’s what Matthew’s gospel gives us. Magi. And the magicians are even the first to speak in Matthew. Yet we made them kings. This couldn’t be more ironic….making the Magi into kings like we are doing them some great favor, because honestly everything in this text is decidedly anti-king. I mean, there is a king in the text…but it’s Herod. A scheming, frightened, insecure, troglodyte who puts a hit out on a toddler. There’s what the text has to say about kings. But our need for the Magi to be kings, our need to nicen up the story a bit puts us in a position to actually have compassion for Herod. I mean…the text says that he was frightened and all of Jerusalem with him. the idea that God would enter the world and upturn the very idea of kingship is understandably frightening to Herod. And for us the idea that God would enter a world amidst infanticide and religious violence is also frightening. The idea that God would enter the world and keep the most impolite company possible is frightening. The idea that God would see the mess we’ve made would be embarrassing. At least call and worn us so we can clean up the place a bit first.

I wonder if our fear of what this means for God to enter the world in such a disagreeable way makes for some interesting revisionism. But the Epiphany story of the fortune telling circus lady discovering the Christ child reveals a God who has entered our world as it actually exists, and not as the world we often wish it would be. This is a God whose presence is not limited to our polite revisions of Biblical stories, but a God who has come to actually consecrate our fear and frailty and suffer their consequences on our behalf.

This is the difference between being familiar with a story and knowing it.

We are familiar with the big star shining above the top of the manger scene. But know that this light, this star which led these Magi to the Christ is a light that shines for you too. This light which points to God shines for all of humanity: Samaratins, Magi, tax collectors, High priests, Herod, AND the people who put Santa and swine in creche scenes.

We may be familiar with the story of the 3 kings bringing gifts to Jesus, but I want you to know about the Magi and how their very distasteful and misplaced presence at the side of the Christ child actually means that the indiscriminate nature of God’s insistent coming to us defies our polite tendencies to nicen up the story.

My friend Justin reminded me this week that God’s love is too pure to enter into a world that does not exist, even though this often how we treat Jesus, as we try to shelter him from the reality of our own brokenness. We often behave as though Jesus were only interested in saving and loving a romanticized version of ourselves, or an idealized version of our mess of a world, and so we offer to him a version of our best selves, and I’m afraid that our religion unintentionally promotes this sort of thing.

The birth of this Christ child is a sordid affair, indeed. While I have no doubts that there were moments of pure bliss and other worldly joy to the whole affair, it seems to me that these moments occur in, with and under what we would call reality, and not apart from it because this is a God who has come to love and save the world as it actually exists.

In case you haven't heard, there is a new game in town. It's called The Wild Goose Festival and I just can't remember being nearly so excited about something. Wild Goose is a faith-based justice and music and arts festival happening June 23-27 outside Durham, NC.

In the Celtic Church the image of the Wild Goose has long been held as a symbol for the wild, unpredictable, and un-tamable nature of the Holy Spirit.

Here's why I'm excited: yeah, my friends will be there and I like (most of) them. Yeah, I'll get to see some amazing art and performances and speakers. But what I love about the Wild Goose is that NOW is the perfect time for it be happening. Now is the time in which we have seen barriers between Christians fade away - even ones we'd just as soon keep around. Now is the time in which Evangelicals are discovering social justice and in which Lutherans are diving into contemplative practices and in which people who have never been part of a church are being broken open by the Gospel and in which churches are realizing that GLBTQ folks are their brothers and sisters and in which the boxes and labels we have all been both protected and persecuted by seem to be falling away and that is nothing if not a result of a mischievous Holy Spirit. The Wild Goose. I can't wait to see what She's up to now.

So, just to get it out of the way, I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas. No, not an ipad or World Peace. Anyone who knows me well knows that what I really wanted for Christmas was a brand new back since mine is wrecked. The disk between my L5 and S1 vertebrae is severely degenerated which means at the age of 41 can’t stand for more than 20 minutes without being in pain. I mention this because in our Gospel reading for today we hear that In the beginning was the Word and The Word was with God and the Word was God And the Word became flesh and lived among us. In short: God decided to have …of all things…a human body.

We Christians have along history of finding this idea disturbing. There was an early Christian heresy called Docetism and I’m not totally convinced that I myself would not have been a docetist given the opportunity. You see, they were so certain that spirit and flesh could not exist as One that they convinced themselves that Jesus didn’t really have a human body…it just seemed that he had a body. Docetists claimed that Jesus only appeared to be a physical being. And I get the impulse behind docetism because really, no self-respecting God would become a human when being human means being irretrievably fragile. What can it mean that God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and was made flesh? Seems a lousy idea in a way, given the very sloppy and broken reality of our physical lives as humans. Our bodies bruise and decay and sag insistently toward the earth so why in the world would God not spare God’s self the indignity of having things like sweat glands and the hiccups?

And besides, having a body is an emotionally complicated thing for us, so why wouldn’t we want a “spirituality” which transcends our broken physical reality. But when we are tempted to think that spirituality equals transcending the physical world of things and bodies we might remember that in Jesus we see that a physical life is a spiritual life…

John’s gospel bears witness to a sensual God. Jesus washed human feet, smelled perfume, and tasted abundant wine. He used spit and dirt to heal a blind man, his gut churned when he looked upon the hungry crowds. Salty tears ran down his face. He smelled the stink of death on Lazarus his friend. Jesus’ very own flesh tore when he was beaten and crucified and when he rose from the dead he told Thomas to touch his wounded side, which was not perfected, but bore the scars of having lived. Then, as one of his final acts on Earth he ate grilled fish on a beach. These experiences of the body are not things to be Spiritually transcended …they are perhaps the very things in which we find Christ.

The Psalmist reminds us that God knit us together in our mother’s womb and that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Of course I see at least 2 barriers to really really believing this. Firstly there is the fact that as a middle aged woman my body seems to be deteriorating right before my eyes. How wonderfully and fearfully made is a body which ages, or grows fat, or develops cancer or no longer produces insulin? The other barrier to believing our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made is that we are literally bombarded by messages otherwise from every billboard we see or commercial we hear. Convincing you that a) your body is bad and b) your body can be “perfect” if you buy a certain product…and let there be no mistake, this is a billion dollar industry.

Yet I wonder if maybe in the incarnation God has done nothing less than baptized all human flesh. Baptized it, not made it into our version of perfect. Perfection as we picture it and as it relates to human bodies is impossible. And perhaps the striving for an impossible perfection is a profound distraction from the way in which we are children born of God. Because as we know, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And even God, when finished creating the physical world including the human form called it good. not perfect mind you, but good. so as we on this 2nd day of the year make our resolutions about losing weight or gaining muscle or lowering cholesterol which are all perfectly fine, let us remember that we are born of God and made Children of God and have no business calling what God pronounced good anything but good. Because if the Word became flesh and lived among us ~ then despite our botoxic quest for the illusion of perfection, God's creation is good.

So this week I invite you to take notice every time you see or hear a message about body improvement. Every pill, or exercise machine, or special gym membership, or tanning bed… every liposuction clinic and celebrity endorsed diet plan. All of it. Notice the obsession our culture has with stretching and tanning and increasing and decreasing our flesh into submission to some sort of bizarre ideal. Then in contrast, notice every time this week that you see or hear this: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, in this we have seen God’s glory, full of grace and truth…you have received the power to be Children of God. Through the fullness of God’s Word made flesh you have received grace upon grace.

That is a different message entirely. In other words, our youth-obsessed body-improvement culture in which we find ourselves tells us that we can avoid any appearance of our own mortality through the right combination of elective surgery and Pilates and in the end this is nothing but a simple fear of death itself. But what God tells us in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ is that we need not fear our mortality in the first place because it simply is not the final word. Death has no sting when it cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ. So we need not fear it. nor deny it.

So Jesus came and in his almost disturbingly physical existence showed us what God looks like, not in some ethereal alternate spiritual plane but right here in the midst of our physical, embodied earthy reality. Jesus said here’s what being born of God looks like… it looks like not worrying about what we're to eat or drink; like loving the bodies of other people who, like us, will die; like touching human flesh as if it's holy instead of worrying that it's unclean, like breaking bread and drinking wine with all the wrong people.

This Christianity stuff is not a religion of disembodied spirituality at all. This is a religion of Word made flesh, of God revealed in the vulnerability of newborn flesh in a cradle and in heartbreak of broken flesh on a cross. So if God saw fit to wear our native garb should we not bless and care for our own flesh? Should we not have concern for any violation or starvation or trafficking of any human bodies as that which God took on to be with us?

As we enter the New Year full of optimism and resolution let us remember that there is a reality beyond our individual self-improvement. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we were given grace upon grace to become children of God and perhaps in doing so we are now flesh become Word. Word for a hurt and broken and beautiful word. You as Christ’s body are no longer about the fear or the denial of death but about life and life abundant. You as Christ’s body are becoming flesh made Word, being made into God’s loving intention for the world God created. In the name of Jesus, amen

Well, the tinsel is still falling to the ground, that plate of cookies left on the counter has yet to go stale and having just barely been blown out the candles we held while singing Silent Night still hold their red glow - while we gather now on this the first Sunday of Christmas and read aloud the Christmas story not of sheep or shepherds or angels but of the slaughter of innocent babies. Yeah, That Christmas story. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas indeed. I’m not gonna lie. Given the death of my Granddaddy on Thursday and the 3 whole days I’ve spent cooking for family and sitting at my mother’s side as she grieves I was secretly relieved when Matthew offered to preach his sermon from this morning at House for All tonight and the relief I felt was more than just “O good, now I don’t have to write a sermon” It was O good, now I can avoid trying to figure out if there is any good new in the slaughter of innocent babies. But in the midst of grief Herod was never far from my thoughts this week as though he was taunting me….daring me to give it a try.

So just to get it out of the way…no. There is no “good news” in the slaughter of the innocents. There is only terror and weeping women. But this story is not going to be removed from the Bible any time soon so I say screw it. Let’s dive in deep.

You see, I think the trouble is that we’ve heard the Christmas story so many times that it’s not shocking anymore. It simply takes its place on a dusty shelf of over familiarity among all the other worn and tattered stories woven into our unconsciousness somewhere between George Washington and the Cherry Tree and Star Wars Return of the Jedi. The Christmas story sits among other things we know so well and we brush it off once a year without even bothering to notice how shocking it really is. But it’s ironic that we fail to be shocked by the story of Christmas - even though its ground shaking in it’s unfathomable beauty - and yet we hear the story of Herod and are shocked… even though innocent children suffer in our world as a result of human pride and greed and fear and hate every day. Herod is nothing less than common.

But you know how we’re used to hearing Christians say “let’s keep Christ in Christmas” well, My friend Joy Carol Wallis, wrote an essay called “Let’s keep Herod in Christmas”

And after thinking about this text all week I have to say, I’m with her, because the thing is…the world into which Christ is born is not one of a Normal Rockwell painting….the world has never been that world. God did not enter the world of our nostalgic silent night snow blanketed peace on earth suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered a world as violent and disturbing as our own. Herod was the Jewish puppet king for Rome…and the wise men were honestly kinda stupid to show up at Herod’s doorstep and say “Hey where’s the child who has been born the King of the Jews” to the guy who is supposed to kinda sorta be king of the Jews. What did they expect… that he would Mapquest it for them? Whatever it was, I’m sure they didn’t expect infanticide on a large scale. The murder of children by a scared little man trying to protect his feeble grasp on worldly power. Here in this Christmas story there simply is no mistletoe and reindeer… this scene of a despotic ruler slaughtering children out of little more than his personal insecurity somehow never makes it onto wrapping paper and the display window at Macys….yet the slaughter of the holy Innocents is as much a part of the Christmas story as are shepherds and angels.

And if you do a little research you’ll find that Bible scholars are all a flutter about how there are no historical documents from that time that mention Herod killing all the babies in Bethlehem so it probably didn’t actually happen … as though this clever academic crap can keep away the reality that this has actually always happened and is actually still happening all around us. Let’s just say I looked up the term ethnic cleansing on Wikipedia yesterday and wished I hadn’t. Tyrants like Herod and Pharaoh and Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevichave always taken that little Lord of the Flies instinct which is really within us all and played it out in three terrifying acts on the human stage. And that thing which resides in the human heart, when unchecked and filled with power, demonstrates itself in killing fields and showers of gas and the slaughter of babies…that thing in the human heart is nothing less that the desire to be free from God so that we might be Gods ourselves. And history has shown…we make lousy Gods. And what makes it worse is that we tend to take the image of what we would be like as Gods (despotic, angry, wanting to be worshipped sycophantically, defensive, insecure, seeking vengence and retribution) then we take that stuff about us and project that on God….as though God must be as lousy at this being-God-business as we would be if given the chance. And when God had had quite enough of our projections, quite enough of our characterizing God as being as vengeful and paranoid as we are - God’s Loving Desire to be Known overflowed the heavens and was made manifest in the rapidly dividing cells within the womb of an insignificant peasant girl. And when the time came for her to give birth to God there was no room in our societies and institutions and business or any of the other things we are so proud of …and let me just say this: (as much as I love Joy to the World) I’m fairly certain that every heart did not prepare him room. Because we already thought we knew what God was like….and how can a heart prepare room for that which it cannot fathom? So rather than waiting till our hearts were prepared instead God simply broke our hearts… like only a baby can do.

So I guess I wonder if keeping Herod in Christmas might remind us that God did not wait till we as the human race got our collective crap together before joining us in the difficult reality of being human. God didn’t just plop God’s self down into a Nostalgic Norman Rockwell painting but entered a world as violent and dangerous as our own. And the weird thing is that God did this heart breaking thing to be with us. Even those who will crucify him. Even Herod. Because the fact is that God is continually breaking our hearts so that the true nature of God can be known – so that in breaking our hearts God can replace them with God’s own. Perhaps this is what is meant when we sing O Holy Night. Long lay the world in sin and error pinning till he appeared and the soul felt it’s worth. May you all allow God to be God for you. May your soul feel its worth. Amen

Matthew 11:2-11

2When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” 4Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. 6And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

7As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? 8What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. 9What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10This is the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’ 11Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Some people when they daydream they daydream about vacations to Europe, or winning the lottery. But I have to confess; when I daydream it’s about things like how cool it would be if someone made a “VH1 Behind the Music” special about John the Baptist. They could feature interviews with Elizabeth and Zechariah while old Photos of young John eating his first locust fade in and out of the background. Then after they could go on to feature his juggernaut of a Prophetic career. The fiery street corner preaching, the sold-out crowds at the Jordon. But then his disciples would inevitably talk about when the problems started. “he just never knew when to stop. The success did weird things to him” they would say. “It was like the pressure of being compared to Elijah got to him” So at this point in my daydream there would be a commercial beak with a teaser. Next on “VH1’s Behind the Music: John the Baptist”, John hits bottom and has a wake up call while in prison.

John the Baptist in our reading tonight from Matthew’s gospel is pretty much at a low point. He is simply not the guy we think of when we hear the name John the Baptist. Gone is the image of the bug eating Wild man shouting repent. Gone is the image of a wild-eyed prophet preparing the way of Lord through his own feral oratories. Gone is the street corner preacher shouting of repentance and fire and brimstone. The screaming and baptizing and preaching to enormous crowds is a distant memory.

Instead we meet John the Baptist today as he sits imprisoned by Herod and wondering if he maybe got this whole thing wrong. I wonder if he seemed…shorter somehow now that he is profoundly less sure of himself. Surely imprisonment can take a few inches off one’s spiritual stature.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples 3and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, When John heard that Jesus was not instigating a takeover of the Roman occupation, when John heard that Jesus was not picking off Herod and burning all their enemies with unquenchable fire as John had expected, he loses his faith. And when he loses his faith he starts telling himself his own story.

It was Jesus’ disciple Thomas who ended up with the moniker “Doubting” but it could very well have been John the Baptist. There he sits in a cold dank jail cell with nothing for company but disappointment and his own thoughts. And does he preach from the cell or sing hymns like Paul and Silas? No. He doubts. He wavers. He sinks into disbelief. So much so that he sends his disciples to go ask Jesus “are you the one?”

When I was growing up there was this tradition in my family where on the day before Christmas and the day before Easter my Mom would dutifully approach each of us kids one by one and ask the solemn question. A question – the answer to which would determine if we were to receive presents and candy. With all the fake seriousness she could muster Peggy would ask “Do you still believe?” Facing our mother as though she were an independent tribunal for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny we would without fail answer yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I was reminded of this last week when Tracy posted on my Facebook wall that she had seen a Christmas t-shirt that said you have to believe to receive.

It can be easy to make Christianity into something similar. you have to believe to receive. as though our success as Christians is partly determined by how robust and unyielding is our faith. Yet the one in the Gospels whom Jesus described as the greatest among men and more than a prophet – even John the Baptizer as he sits in prison does so in a state of unbelief.

Bonhoeffer writes that Advent is like this. He says that Advent is like sitting in a prison cell waiting for someone to open the door, waiting for the Word which will release you from prison. The Word that will release you from prison. If God can create from a Word…if God can speak and it is made real, if the Word of God can be made flesh and dwell among us to comfort and save, if God’s Word can do all of this then maybe God’s Word can open our prisons of disbelief. Because when John, the Preacher from the desert, sits in his prison of disillusionment Jesus does not rebuke him for his unbelief. He does not bemoan a perverse and faithless generation … he sends people to tell him what they see and what they hear. Jesus sends the preacher a preacher. He sends others to go tell him the story again and he does so by quoting Isaiah. the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. In John’s moment of disillusionment and despair, in his moment of doubt and isolation when he begins to tell himself his own story Jesus sends people to be his Storyteller. They are sent to bear the story of what they have heard and seen. They speak the Word of God to their own preacher as some of you have done on occasion.

You see, there is no shame in unbelief. In fact, if you are struggling with your faith it’s probably just your turn. The Western individualism in our culture has really done a number on us convincing us that faith is something we must possess in sufficient quantity as individuals, when in fact faith has always been a team sport. When Jesus Said “Where 2 or more are gathered I am with you” I don’t think it meant that like a diva Jesus needs a guaranteed minimum audience before showing up. I think it means that we bear Christ to one another. That we hold the faith on one another’s behalf. That faith is never given in sufficient quantity to individuals it’s given in sufficient quantity to the community. This is what being a people of The Book, people of The Story is all about.

If God forbid something awful happened to one of my children I’m pretty sure I couldn’t believe in God in that moment. I’m sure I would not want to come to church. I certainly wouldn’t be singing hymns of praise and I for sure would be really pissed at God. Would all of this mean that I was no longer be a woman of faith? no. It just means that I would need you to do all of these things for me. Because that’s just how it works. There is no shame in unbelief. In fact, there are times when only in doubting do we begin to take our faith seriously enough for it to be unthreatened.

When you yourselves struggle with what you believe it makes you no less people of faith. About 9 month after this church got going, someone asked if I would go for a walk because there was something they wanted to talk to me about. We circled City Park as they proceeded to tell me with some hesitation that they didn’t have the same theology of baptism than I did. They had different beliefs. After cautiously and painstakingly informing me of this fact I look at them and said “I’m so glad you told me because now I know you better. But please don’t take it personally when I say…I don’t actually care.” I don’t really care what you believe. I care what you hear. Beliefs are fluid and go up and go down. People in this church believe all sorts of stuff. Trust me on that. But we aren’t responsible for making sure we have pure doctrine and right belief about everything…we’re just responsible for hearing the story and telling the story. That’s what we do as the church.

And in this Advent season as we are surrounded by the cacophony of competing stories – some of our own making and some of the consumer culture swirling all around us…may we listen for the Word. listen for the story all around you the story of a God who creates life from a Word and for the story of the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. Tell others of what you see and hear. Because I think Bonhoeffer was right. Advent is like sitting in a prison cell waiting for someone to open the door, waiting for the word, the story, the Christ, the friend, the song, the faith of your brother or sister which will release you. Amen

(We then during Open Space - the time for reflection and prayer that follows the sermon - wrote what prisons we need to be freed from on the paper sky lantern that we then released into the night sky at the end of liturgy. See photo by Amy Clifford above)

“O my Gosh, we’re out of turkey” Stuart yells from the kitchen. The statement puts a quick stop to the action in the church basement where moments before a clamor of zip-lock baggies, packets of mayonnaise, pumpkin pie bars and mischievious holiday cheer seemed unstoppable. Everyone pauses but the children who, unaware of the work stoppage continue to slap “It sucks you have to work on Thanksgiving. Operation: Turkey Sandwich, brought to you by House for All Sinners and Saints.” stickers paper lunch sack after paper lunch sack.

It’s our second year doing this; bringing Thanksgiving lunches to unsuspecting folks all over our city who are unlucky enough to have to work on a holiday when most of the rest of us get to be with friends and family. Our sack lunches mirror the traditional Thanksgiving meal: sandwiches made from freshly roasted turkeys, pumpkin pie bars and stuffing muffins (all accompanied by salt, pepper, mayonnaise and mustard packets and a napkin). After assembling the 300 bags we load them into our cars and disperse to find any gas station cashiers, security guards, bartenders, bus drivers or hospital janitors we can track down. Hopping out our cars we hand them these little gifts saying “Sorry you have to work on Thanksgiving” jump back in our cars and try and find the next victim. And it’s not just the “members” of House for All who are involved. The local newspaper listed OTS as an alternative idea for how to spend Thanksgiving and we were inundated with people wanting to participate. So we welcomed so-called strangers into the life of our church to make some food, assemble some bags and distribute some joy for no reason other than the gifts of God are free and for all. And the only other reason we have for doing any of this is "why wouldn't we?". Well, that and it's just really, really fun.

In this season in which we find ourselves there is an anticipatory feeling in the air. A waiting, a longing and yearning. This is a time filled with preparations and signs and symbols. Everything leads to this promised future. With our turkey stuffed bellies we awaken from a triptafan induced coma of carbohydrates to the coming of what feels like the end times– For there will be sales and rumors of sales. So stay awake my brothers and sisters, because the doorbusting shopacalypse is upon us. Yet my heart was glad when they said to me let us go at 5a to the house of the Lord and Taylor. For on that holy mountain people will stream from East and West, North and South and all nations will come and they will turn plastic cards into shiny promises of love in the form of bigger plastic and cloth and metal and wire and they will go down from this mountain to wrap their bits of plastic and cloth and metal and wire they will wrap it all in paper to wait for that day. The day of mythical sentimentalized domesticity when the hopes and dreams of love and family and acceptance and perfect, perfect reciprocity will come to pass. And the children shall believe that they shall be always good and never bad for Santa will come like a thief in the night. No one knows the hour so you better be good for goodness sake.

This distorted bogus version of the story of how God entered our world in Christ seems to be playing all around us. It can be difficult to discern the real contours and dimensions of our actual Christian story during a time of the year when TV specials and bill boards and radio ad seem to be kind of telling it. So conflated are the symbols of faith with the symbols of culture that it can be hard to discern the difference. This, this is why I prefer Lent…a season when we are at least not assaulted by doorbuster sales for sack cloth and ashes. The world leaves us quite alone to celebrate that one by ourselves.

But this is it, the first Sunday of Advent. And I invite you to hear again the gospel for today which speaks of the coming of our Lord:

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

So, as a perfect foil to the noise of cultural Christmas on this first Sunday of Advent we are greeted not with images of the virgin Mary or the soft cooing of a new born savior but with a text my friend Russell described as "the anticipated threat of Jesus kidnapping someone at work and then breaking into my house and robbing me". yes, our gospel text for today will not be alluded to in and Peanuts Christmas specials or sales at Target.

Be ready says Jesus. Be ready. During this season of Advent we talk a lot about wakefulness and waiting and anticipation…which are all lovely. But the thing this text talks about the most…. the quality attributed first to angels, then to Jesus then to you is not longing or watchfulness … it’s the quality of not-knowing. While absolute certainty has long been the hallmark of religion, here we see that perhaps being in a state of emptiness and not-knowing is actually quite hopeful…. since a full cup has no need of more wine or as My Mom used to say “once someone is right about something they stop taking in new information.”

Be ready says Jesus. Be ready. And while it’s easy to assume that being ready is the same as knowing what to look for – I’m pretty sure that when we think we know what to look for we often miss what we were meant to find altogether. So I began to wonder if the angels not knowing, Jesus not knowing, you not knowing and the word “unexpected” might point to something other than putting all our eggs in the “knowing what to look for basket”.

Like when our ears already know the story we might miss the fact that Jesus then says be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. Maybe just maybe being awake, and alert and expectant has nothing to do with knowing and certainty and has a lot to do with being in a state of un-knowing…of having what Richard Rhor calls a beginner’s mind. Maybe we use our knowingness - our certainty we’re right - as a sort of loss-prevention program…a system by which we actually protect ourselves from the unknown and the unexpected. That is to say, maybe it isn’t certainty at all but a spiritual not-knowing that is what “being ready for Jesus” looks like. And maybe to me that’s a little scary.

Because here’s the thing: like the house owner, Knowing what to look for - as a way of avoiding being robbed - is only advantageous if we assume being robbed is a bad thing. Perhaps having an un-knowing beginner brain allows us to be taken unaware by the grace of God…the grace of God which is like a thief in the night. When we actually don’t know what to look for everything that happens to us is the unexpected. Perhaps the good news here is that Jesus has been staking the joint and there will be a break – in. The promise of Advent is that in the absence of knowing we get robbed, that there was and is and will be a break in…because this God in which we live and move and have our being is not interested in our loss-prevention programs but in saving us from ourselves and our culture and even our certainties about the story itself. This holy thief wants to steal from us and maybe that is literal and metaphoric at the same time. Because in this season of pornographic levels of consumption in which our credit card debts rise and our waistbands expand maybe the idea that Jesus wants to break in and jack some of your stuff is really good news. I started thinking this week that maybe we should make Advent lists – kind of like Christmas lists but instead of things we want Santa to bring us, we write down things what we want Christ to take from us. You know, in hopes he could pickpocket the stupid junk in our houses, or abscond with our self-loathing or resentment…maybe break in and take off with our compulsive eating or our love of money in the middle of the night. Don’t you kind of long for God to do something unexpected?

Then as we listen to our sacred story this Advent let us tune out not only the noise of cultural Christmas, but also our own assumptions and expectations about what we think this story means. Let us listen together with beginner’s ears. With ears that listen for God’s surprising grace. The kind of grace which will knock the wind out of you.

Under the cover of a deep blue Advent darkness may Christ, this holy thief, rob you of your certainty about what you think the story of Jesus is all about. May this thieving God envelop you in the surprising story of God’s suffering love which takes from us that which we can really really do without and replaces it all with God’s own self.

32Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. 33When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 36The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, 37and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

A few months ago there was a group of you in my living room when the topic of Jr High School came up. Someone asked how I felt about My daughter Harper starting middle school and I said it terrified me. I would never willingly send my child to enter like, Kabul .. why would I want to send them to enter Middle School which is basically the emotional equivalent of a war zone? The 5 of us sat there and recalled our own painful experiences form that age in our lives. That night as we sat together … grown adults in our 20s 30s and 40s we could barely speak the derisive nicknames and insults which were tailor made for us by our peers like verbal garments for us to wear. Or just as painfully perhaps the ones we made for others to wear. The socially Darwinistic environment of Jr High seems to create this ability to emotionally eviscerate each other through insult. And the wounds don’t go away. Not entirely at least.

So in this age we find ourselves in which bullying is finally finally finally being addressed it’s interesting that the gospel text for today is one in which Jesus himself is being derided, mocked and taunted. And strangely, this is the text for this festival of the church called Christ the King Sunday. We celebrate Christ as King by reading the text in which he is insulted, mocked and killed.

All the taunting of his final day came form the fact that he would not defend himself. No genuine Messiah would go and get himself killed in a totally preventable way. Yet Jesus would not take and eye for and eye he would not call 10,000 angels as the old gospel hymn says. He would not do any of the things that a self-respecting messiah would do. I mean, during his ministry people had seen what he could pull off. Healing others, feeding others, providing huge vats of wine out of water for others– with those kinds of powers and a little more self-esteem? .. man… Jesus could have had it all. “save yourself” they chanted….And if the taunts of the crowd have a familiar ring there’s a reason – remember when Jesus had been fasting in the wilderness – another voice saying to him “If you really are the son of man turn these stone to bread… if you really are the son of God then throw your self down from the top of the temple and have angels catch you. At the very beginning of Jesus ministry Satan tried this same thing and it didn’t work so, as Luke 4:13 says when the devil had finished every test he departed from Jesus until an opportune time. Like the day of his death.

The leaders, the first thief, the crowds, the soldiers…they all mocked Jesus as though to say obviously you’re not the son of God because the God we know is powerful and vengeful and slightly insecure and would never allow himself to take this level of insult. The crowds made some fairly reasonable suggestions for what a genuine Messiah might do in a situation like his own crucifixion. Satan made a few Messiah makeover suggestions himself – feed yourself – do some tricks show off your mad skills. Everyone thinks God should do what we would do if we were God. And then we judge God according to how we think God is doing with that. And hey, I’d love to clean Jesus up a bit so he’d at least be presentable in public but as one of my favorite theologicans, Gerhart Forde says “God is simply not a being who can be manipulated by our opinions”

We’d love God to be the King of our particular value system. But here’s the thing – most of God is unknowable. Period. And really we should probably be grateful for that.

Yet when it comes down to it the most reliable way to legitimately know anything at all about the nature of God is to look to how God chose to reveal God’s self in Christ. And most notably we see who God is in how God chose to reveal God’s self on the cross. And just to be clear: The cross is not about God as divine child abuser sadly sending his little boy off to be killed because we were bad and well, somebody had to pay. Because the irony about viewing the cross this way is that the whole thing was about God saying pay attention – don’t avert your eyes from the cross. This this is the logical end of your value system.Here is where it will always end. In the suffering of God. Here is the extent I will go says God to defy your idea of me as a vengeful God. If you think I am about smiting your enemies then think again for I will not lift even a finger to condemn those who hung me. I will simply not be known as the God of vengeance. I will simply not allow you to project your puffed up human traits on me as though I’m a bigger better version of the best parts of you or abigger badder version of the worst parts of you

On the cross we don’t see a legal transaction where Jesus pays our debt. We see God. The Word made flesh hangs from the cross. And let there be no mistake – this is Christ the King. And while his scornful and shameful death is insulting to our idea of a king and a God the divine royalty of Christ is simply unassailable. by us or anyone else. because sometimes things are so holy that they cannot be desecrated try as we might.

In the previous chapter of Luke as Jesus sits at table sharing his last supper with his friends they break out in an argument over who will be the greatest. Jesus says “the greatest of you must become like the youngest and the leader like one who serves…I confer on you says Jesus to his faltering friends “I confer on you a kingdom so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and you will sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

Even Jesus speaks of his kingdom and of thrones and judgment. Yet today on Christ the king Sunday we see that Christ’s kingdom is comprised of thieves and Christ-deniers. Today on Christ the King Sunday we see our king enthroned yet the throne is not one of gold and jewel but of blood and puke stained wood and the crown is not one of gold and jewel but of twisted thorn. And as his crown is piercing his brow it is from here the King of Glory judges the world who put him on a cross. From his rough hewn throne of a cross Jesus looks at the world…those who betrayed him, those who executed him those who loved him and those who ignored him and he judges it all. The pronouncement is made and the judgment is ….forgiveness. Forgive them Father for they know not what they are doing is, as my friend Justin reminded me this week, an eternally valid statement. From his cross Christ the King loves the betrayer, the violent, the God killer in all of us. Because his divine self was unmockable. Protected and apart and unmanipulatable by our opinions and value systems. And it finally is only a God who enters our human existence and suffers our insults with only love and forgiveness who can save us from ourselves. It is only a self-emptying God who walked among as Christ Jesus, who, in the words of St Paul, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, humbled himself to the point of death— even death on a cross.

There in that self-empying we see the image of God. There on the cross we receive the blessedness of God’s own self poured out for us. And the imago dei, the image of this very God is within you and is also that which cannot be profaned. Cannot be insulted. Cannot be mocked. Cannot be injured. For you are children of a crucified king.

1 He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; 2 he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. 3 He said, “Truly I tell you, thispoor widow has put in more than all of them; 4 for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.” 5 When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 6 “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” 7 They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” 8 And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray;for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them. 9 “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” 10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; 11 there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. 12 “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. 13 This will give you an opportunity to testify. make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; 14 So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; 15 for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. 17 You will be hated by all because of my name. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your souls.

Many of you were undoubtedly captivated by the images on the internet and TV a few weeks ago, when the Chilean miners were rescued from the depths of the dark underworld. Buried. Entombed. Helpless. Trapped. And then, like in Jacob’s dream, a ladder descends from above, with angels descending and ascending, in the form of a capsule inside a two- foot-wide tunnel. The entire world fixed its eyes on this one spot. Who can ever forget the image of the giant wheel of fortune – turning and pulling the tiny capsule up from the depths? And then, one by one, they appear! Risen and alive, rescued from the dark belly of the underworld.

Jonah had nothing on these guys. A story too good to be true, one that Hollywood could never match (though I’m sure they’ll try). The ultimate gospel image before our very eyes. No words were needed . . . . right? Well . . .

It seems Christians always feel the need to add words to explain things, for the world is just not smart enough to figure out such imagery for themselves. [By the way, this is one of the things that Ellen and I so appreciate about this community. . . y’all don’t do that here!]. But sadly, this happens all too often in many Christian traditions – at least the tribe that Ellen and I have emerged from. “What an incredible testimony!” was a phrase I began to see in emails and on Facebook posts. Only they weren’t referring to the miners’ story. They were referring to the miners’ T-shirts – given to the miners by a local evangelical ministry. With billions watching, a veritable public relations coup for the Jesus Film Project.

But as I began to shake my head in derision over such schmaltzy “evangelism” techniques, a thought came to me. Putting those nice T-shirts on the miners – isn’t that a lot like us? Covering our filth and our nakedness and our powerlessness with an exterior that tells the world that we’re cleaned up? We’ve got it figured out . . . that we know the way? Don’t we hate it when we’re naked in the dark – weak, powerless, trapped, filthy – unable to see the way out of our predicament, whatever it may be?

In the backdrop to today’s Gospel text (I took the liberty of adding the paragraph that comes just before today’s lectionary text), Jesus is hanging out by the treasury of the temple, watching how people give. Pretty unnerving, if you think about it. Watching how and where we give is like opening a window to our inner world. And of course we’re not just talking about money here. We’re talking about everything.

Temple, treasury, stones and gifts. “Ornaments” – Luke calls them (at least in some translations). Looks pretty good on the outside. Certainly easy to be captivated by such things. But then, as he loves to do, Jesus goes Jesus on them: as they gaze upon their coveted ornaments, Jesus nails a sign on the temple, naming all that captivates them as “condemned property.” It’s all goin’ down, He says.

And, as if on cue, just as this window is being opened to my inner world, a widow walks by. Seems that her two dollars, Jesus says, are more than everything given from my abundance and together-ness. With a reckless abandon, the widow gives everything she had – she gives out of her poverty. And what’s more, giving like this will keep her in her poverty.

The message is simple, but one we just don’t want to hear: This is how Christians give best – giving from the place where we feel most impoverished. Stripped of coolness and control; bankrupt, with nothing to offer. No words, no answers, no strategies. Yet this is where Jesus shines most. Jesus can’t fill a cup that’s full of itself. Jesus can’t shine through a clay pot with no cracks in it. James Houston, a dear soul and mentor from Regent College in Vancouver, once put it this way:

“Your Achilles heel will be the threshold of God’s grace in your life; but where you feel strong and confident, it is there you will be tempted towards atheism.”

*Damn!* J

And what’s the deal with all these other “signs” that Jesus talks about here? Is this passage talking about the “End Times”? Actually, I think what Luke is doing here is distinguishing the “end of all things” from particular historical events. The temple may have to come to an end, but it’s not the end. Peace will come to an end and be swallowed up by war, but war is not the way the world ends. Security will end – shaken in earthquakes, but fear and uncertainty are not the end either. People will try to mimic Jesus, but the world will not end with truth’s impersonators. “Dreadful portents and great signs from heaven” may tempt you to play prophet yourself, reading the concealed meanings of mysterious clues, but knowing the end does not belong to you.

Theologically, Luke undoubtedly has an important point to make, but rhetorically, he’s frightening the crap out of his readers! Wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famine, plagues . . . and just when it seems it cannot possibly get any worse, it gets personal: You will be arrested, you will be persecuted, you will be thrown into prison, you will be betrayed even by family and friends, and some of you will even be put to death. And you will be hated by all.

And right when everything is at it’s darkest, when other christs and other ways seem so alluring and persuasive, when humanity’s warring seems endless, and your world shakes beneath your feet, it is then that you will have an opportunity to “testify”. But what is the nature of our testimony? In other words, how do our lives substantiate Christ when everything in and around us is falling apart?

Jesus says that our testimony can’t be canned. Our testimony will be given to us in the moment. It’s something you can’t fake or manufacture: it arises out of years of chiseling and shaping, forged through the fires of relationship. And “the rockier the relationship the better” is what Luke seems to be saying here. Jesus is not our boyfriend.

What kind of testimony of God’s “faithfulness” do we give in the face of confusion, ambivalence, death, and betrayal by loved ones? We’ve all heard the testimonies that praise God for blessings and healings, rescue and salvation . . . you know, when the test results come back negative. But what Jesus is saying here is something very different. He is telling us that when we experience destruction, betrayal, and loss, and we are brought to our wits’ end, perhaps it is then that our testimony most sounds like Jesus.

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”

“Suffering always means pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness,” writes Shawn Copeland. “It can render us powerless and mute, push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair.”

Great suffering changes some people and defeats others. But if we can somehow hang on to Jesus and endure, Luke says, it is there that our souls are gained. Maybe this is what Jesus is getting at when He says, if we save our lives we’ll lose it, but if we lose our lives, we’ll find it. We’ll find our souls.

I think what Luke’s gospel is saying is this: that suffering provides an opportunity for those who have been changed by it to tell of their hope. And this kind of hope begets hope in others. Kind of like what Jenny and Jennifer Knapp and others did yesterday at Highlands.

Howard Thurman, an African American theologian, once made this poignant observation on how he has seen suffering change people: “Into their relationships comes a vital generosity that opens the sealed doors of the heart in all who are encountered along the way.”

So in the midst of whatever doubts, confusion, death, and ambivalence you might be experiencing, Jesus says that it is here that you will be given an opportunity to testify. But our testimony can’t be canned. It can’t be of our own doing. Jesus relieves us of the anxiety we might be feeling to have it all together, for our powerlessness to speak may be our most essential qualification.

At first glance, it would be tempting here to default to the conventional wisdom that says, “Don’t worry – it’ll come to you” or “You’ll be fine – you’ll think of something in the moment.” But this kind of assurance is precisely what Jesus is NOT offering here. Instead, the only thing He promises is this: “I will give you the words.” It is Christ who embodies a wisdom our troubled world cannot calculate or comprehend. We do not have to create the words; they are received as a gift. And perhaps the “words” we are given are, in actuality, one word . . . The Word? “Christ in you, the hope of glory – the hope of substance” as St. Paul says in Colossians. And although this word has been rejected before, Christ will continue to speak the word of this alternative kingdom through the Church. And such words not only describe a kingdom, but actually create a habitable space – a place where we can lay our weary heads and rest in hope. Such words endure with power – even the power to gain your soul. To become a person of substance.

In a world lacking substance, where is our substance to be found? Here (point to the table). By taking in Jesus. By letting Christ come in through the holes, the wounds, the seemingly “weak” places in your life. By surrendering our feeble attempts at manufacturing our own testimony. Your Achilles heel is the threshold of God’s grace in your life. That sounds like foolishness. It sounds like a joke. And it is a joke. But the joke’s not on us. For if you go way back – to the beginning of our story, we are let in on the joke. In the emblematic story of humanity’s wounded-ness and weakness, when Adam and Eve were enticed by knowledge (of good and evil), giving up on the simple – yet more difficult - path of trust, God let Adam and Eve in on the joke. Remember what God said in the garden? To the serpent God said:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”

Do you see the picture there? The head of the serpent would be crushed by a heel that’s been bruised. What’s your Achille’s heel? Where have you been bruised by the world’s evils? Where do you struggle with doubt, and wrestle to maintain hope? This is the hope of the Gospel: It is that very place – your Achilles heel- where God will show up and crush the head of the serpent.

Luke 6:20-31

20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

27“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you.

It’s All Saints Sunday today. I know this might not ever be a popular idea but I am officially suggesting we re-name this ancient feast of the church All Sinners and Saints Day. And here’s why:

Because a couple months ago Amy Clifford and I were walking down Sherman between 13th & 14th when we noticed a large memorial in the courtyard of that weird Pillar of Fire church across from the capital…you know, the one with big pink call letters KPOF on roof…anyhow…so this memorial said “Alma White, founder of the Pillar of Fire church 1901” I totally freaked. Turning to ACliff I said “Alma…that’s a woman’s name isn’t it? Did a woman plant a church in urban Denver in 1901????” Desperate for someone I can place in the category “hero” or “role model” it took me about 2 seconds to pull out my iphone and look up information on Alma White. My excitement about discovering a new hero only built as I read her Wikepedia entry…and I quote “Alma Bridwell White (born 1862 – died 1946) was the founder, and a 'bishop,' of the Pillar of Fire Church. In 1918, she became the first 'woman bishop' in the United States. She was noted for her feminism, ......and her association with the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, .....her anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, racism, and..... hostility to immigrants”

Great.

The next day I called my friend Sara to tell her the story of how I thought I had a hero but it ends up she’s just a lousy racist… and her response was “email me her name…I’ll add her to the litany of saints along with all the other broken people of God”

I don’t want Alma White on the litany of saints. It messes with my categories…I want racists to stay in the ‘racist’ box. When they start sneaking into the ‘saint’ box it, you know, makes me nervous.

But on this day when we remember the dead I wonder if examining how we use categories and boxes might be useful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we can avoid using them all together…What ways do we have of understanding the world around us if not through the use of category? Early in human development putting things in proper categories allowed for our survival… knowing whether a certain plant, for instance, fell in the category “dinner” or the category “poison”. So while they are inevitable, categories and our use of them can also be a window into our desires…especially when it comes to our need for purity.. wanting the good people to be all good and the bad people to be all bad.

So in Luke’s Beatitudes we heard earlier you know the “blessed are”s the and “woe to”s…well it feels like Jesus has a few things to say about our reliance on categories. He comes and says you know your category “blessed” the big box in which you conceptually place all the good things and the lucky people? Well, Jesus says, just watch as I slip some unsettling things into your box labled “blessed” And out of the corner of our eye we see Jesus put the poor, the hungry, the reviled into the blessed box, and do it with impunity.

Then he turns and puts all the wrong people in the ‘woe to you’ box: the wealthy, those with full bellies along with people who laugh.

And that’s what Jesus does with our categories, our precious ways if being so sure about everything: who is good who is bad who is blessed who is cursed who is right who is wrong. Maybe Jesus is telling us that our categories and need for purity aren’t actually going to help us understand God at all.

I, for one, think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kinda important. But when Jesus again and again says that last shall be first and the first shall be last and the poor are blessed and the rich are cursed and that prostitutes make great dinner guests then it makes me wonder if our need for pure black and white categories is maybe not true religion at all but is actually sin. Bonhoeffer said the original sin in the garden of Eden was choosing knowledge of good and evil over the knowledge of God. We’d rather know what categories we fit in and more importantly what categories others fit in rather than know God and I think on some level what that ends up meaning is that we can either try and be God, or we can know God. It’s kinda hard to pull off both.

So when Jesus messes with all our categories it’s not a call to get better categories, maybe it’s a call to subvert them all together. Because what we are dealing with here is not so much an either/or God but a both/and God. And in a culture that thinks the purpose of religion is the proper application of categories: right from wrong, good from bad, sinner from saint, pure from impure this can be a problem. Yet suspending the categories for a minute might just allow us to sit in what the mystics called the great cloud of unknowing.

And where are we the closest to the great unknowing but when we touch the mystery of death. Death, the ultimate impurity.

It is finally only a God who does not adhere to our categories who can enter into death itself and say even here…even here on the cross I will be found. I will be with my broken saints and forgiven sinners not just in times of full bellies and laughter but in times of suffering and despair. And in this both/and God in whom we live and move and have our being that we are connected to all who were and all who are and all who will be. So that even the categories of time and space are suspended, supplanted, subverted. This is what it is to be sainted – it is to be entirely human and bound to the broken reality of life yet somehow free from all of it at the same time. This freedom, this unknowing in the face of God is the key to sainthood that is, to understanding all our lives as belonging to, coming from, going to God.

For it is not our ability to be saintly but God’s ability to work through sinners that makes us and those who have gone before us the saints of God. It is not our ability to choose good over evil which makes us pure – it’s God’s ability to forever name us as God’s own which makes us saints. The title is always conferred…it’s never earned.

I mean, Alma White was a stone-cold racist who also paved the way for women become leaders in the church. To say a racist can be a saint is not the same as saying that being a racist is saintly. Martin Luther reformed the church, translated the Bible into the vernacular so that for the first time in history regular people could read it and then toward the end of his life he wrote horrible anti-semetic rants. Martin Luther King Jr sparked a non-violent revolution in America insisting on the freedom and dignity of all God’s children and he cheated on his wife.

The point being lets call a sin a sin by all means but if we want purity in our Saints or in our selves we are going to be disappointed.

So on the Feast of All Saints and Sinners let us celebrate not the myth of saintly purity but the God who manages to get all kinds of redemptive beautiful things done through broken saints and redeemed sinners. And let us sit in the great cloud of unknowing with the communion of saints being certain of nothing but the mystery of it all…and that somehow in this both/and God all of what we see as good and bad and pure and impure…the saints and the racists all of it is held together. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. Alleluia. Amen

"In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually being all up in my face.''

Well, it's parable day again boys and girls. Parables are like Jesus' subversive little stories of an alternate universe. This alternate universe is comprised not of alternate things but of ordinary things: coins and yeast and wheat and sons and Fathers and widows. Yet these ordinary things are how the nature of God is revealed in surprising, even shocking or scandalous ways within the quotidian - within the very ordinary.

Jesus' parables tend to be deeply engaging and really frustrating at the same time: you can meditate on them, struggle with them, enter into them, speak of them but you just can't solve them. The best way to suck the life out of a parable is by attempting to neatly allegorize it or worse try to figure out the so-called moral of the story. Parables aren't about morals they are about truth - hidden, unyielding, disruptive truth. The kind of truth that simply can't be contained.

So rather than look at parables straight on we sometimes only discover the meaning they contain for us by closing one eye and tilting our heads and looking at them sideways. So while it's tempting to look straight on and see the story of the persistent widow as a self-help technique by which we can get all the cash and prizes we want out of God's divine vending machine if we just kind of bug God to death through ceaseless prayer, when it comes down to it, we know better. And when we find ourselves saying something is a “answer to our prayer” we might do well to ask what exactly, is an answered prayer? Do we only think God answers by giving us what we ask for? We know that just praying hard enough or righteously enough doesn't get us what we want. We know better because even in the midst of prayer we have seen cancer be defeated and we have seen cancer win. We've seen the powerful exploit the weak and we've seen the weak rise up. We've seen teenagers who flourish and we've seen the sullen reality of depression steal the joy of youth.

Yet Luke tells us that this parable of the persistent widow and the unrighteous judge is about our need to pray constantly and not lose hope. So maybe an alternate reading of this parable is that it's yes, about persistence and prayer and hope but maybe it's about the persistence of God. Maybe it is us who, even though we fail to fear God or care about people, are finally worn down by the persistence of a God who longs for justice. Maybe prayer isn't the way in which we manipulate God but is simply the posture in which we finally become worn down by God's persistence. God's persistence in loving us …God's persistence in forgiving and being known and being faithful and always, always, always bringing life out of death.

Maybe the persistence of our prayer is nothing more than our spiritual exposure to the persistence of God's longing for a world of justice and beauty - a world where we are finally no longer alone but connected to God and each other in ways that are as surprising as a parable. Ways which seem ordinary but which reveal a different kind of relationship. And to pray is to connect our selves to this persistent longing of God.

New testament Scholar Fred Craddock describes this as a process by which a person is being hammered through long days and nights of prayer into a vessel that will be able to hold the answer when it comes.

In this world we live in - a world of Western individualism and alienation, I think prayer is radically about connection. It is to live not unaffected by what is happening in each others' lives. To pray for each other is to live not unaffected by what is happening in the blessed and broken and beautiful world in which God has placed us.

In Luke and throughout scripture we are told to pray constantly, pray without ceasing, so that we do not lose heart. And how do you pray without ceasing? Only by having others pray for you, with you. Because let's face it, who can pull off praying without ceasing alone?....we all need to occasionally you know, sleep and eat and run to King Soopers. So to pray without ceasing is not an individual sport if anything it's a relay race. It’s what we do for each other, and it’s what we do for the world.

And these prayers are like these gossamer threads connecting us to God and God’s people. When we pray on another's behalf we become connected to that person through God, and we become connected to God through that person. And in these connections God gets stuff done. Not necessarily the stuff we think God should do, but the work that God is always about, which is redeeming us and all of creation. These gossamer threads of prayer, woven through the space and time of our lives, are like the network through which God sends God's own love for the world.

A week ago Tuesday Richard awoke early in the morning to news that his son Andrew in New York City was in the ER with severe abdominal pain. As a parent myself it's hard to image the fear and panic this most certainly caused. Andrew was soon wheeled into emergency surgery - Richard was soon boarding a flight to New York. Unable to "do" anything and not knowing what the outcome of this crisis might be, Richard, before leaving his house for the airport posted a request on our prayer list-serve. Within moments the replies started coming in. Gossamer threads from us through God to Richard and Andrew and Charlotte. It's in these moments of powerlessness that we somewhat naturally turn to prayer and pray we did. Not just us though because Richard, myself and I'm sure others posted the prayer request on Facebook and Twitter. People all over the country and even some in Germany and the UK were holding the Russeth family in prayer. I typed up a 24 hour narrative of the continual responses from friends known and unknown "I'm praying for Andrew" "holding you all in God's light" "Lord have mercy". It's 5 pages long.

I started to think this week that our prayer is less how we get what we want and more how God gets what God wants. And if Jesus' final prayer for his disciples at the end of John's gospel is any indication, then what God wants for us is a kind of redemption that comes not through individualism and looking out for #1. Right before his death God the Son prayed for us to God the Father asking this about us: that they may be one, as we are one, in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

So the very prayer Christ prayed for us is one of connection. That we might know love and become completely one. whatever happens to our children, whatever happens to us, None of us is alone. We are connected by prayer to each other and to God.

It hurts sometimes. But the more you see suffering and injustice around you, the more you pray and the more you pray the more connected you are to that suffering, and the more connected you are to that suffering the more connected you are to the crucified and risen Christ. For these silken threads of prayer which connect us to God and to oneanother and even to our enemies are how God is stitching our broken humanity back together. So church, pray without ceasing and do not lose heart. For God has some stuff to do.

Richard Russeth came to the Christian faith at House For All Sinners and Saints. He really never saw himself ever becoming a Jesus follower, but you know...it happens. Day before yesterday Richard's son in NYC became gravely ill.

24 hours, 14 minutes in the life of a praying church

6:41a Richard Russeth posts on FB

My son, Andrew, is in the hospital in NYC with severe abdominal pain. Since he had his appendix out years ago they are trying to figure this mystery out and we are a little worried. Prayers appreciated!

Richard's son, Andrew, is in the hospital in NYC with severe abdominal pain. Since he had his appendix out years ago they are trying to figure this mystery out and we are a little worried. Prayers appreciated!

2:39 Text from Nadia to Richard: I have Rev Vince – Jak Bakker’s co-pastor at Revolution NY offering a pastoral visit. Just let me know, he’s amazing. Also, just got a tweet from people praying in London.

Update: 5:25p Hi, from richard: Just managed to see Andrew before they threw us out of the recovery room for the night. He had a million tubes in him but is on the road to recovery after some pretty hard surgery. He was in a lot of pain until they got his meds figured out. He says he now knows what a "10" is on the pain scale. Poor kid. But he's on the mend thanks to all your prayers - keep them coming! Thanks and blessings from NYC!!

8:09p update: Richard posts on his Facebook Richard Russeth First, thanks to everyone for all the prayers. It means a lot to everyone!

8:13 Richard Russeth Just managed to see Andrew before they threw us out of the recovery room for the night. He had a million tubes in him but is on the road to recovery after some pretty hard surgery. He was in a lot of pain until they got his meds figured out. He says he now knows what a "10" is on the pain scale. Poor kid. But he's ...on the mend thanks to all your prayers - keep them coming! Thanks and blessings from NYC!!

8:17p Praying - any news? Ellen

8:18p text from Nadia to Richard: Dear God please hold Andrew in your powerful and merciful hands and bring peace to Richard. In the name of Christ, Amen.

8:30 (facebook) Nadia Bolz-Weber Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your loves sake. Amen. (BCP)

Well, you know what they say: just can’t hear too many sermons on the book
of Habakkuk can you?Habakkuk
reminds me of what my kids are like when I promise them ice cream when they
finish their chores.More
specifically Habakkuk reminds me of what my kids are like after I’ve promised
them ice cream but before the promise is fulfilled and while they still are in
the midst of their dreaded chores.Because this is when they tend to display what we call…lament.

There is quite a strong tradition in the OT of
complaining to God about injustice and suffering.It’s lamenting - and we should perhaps reclaim this
part of our tradition…I have a friend who says if you’re going to have a praise
band in your church, that’s fine but only if you also have a lament band.

And there are some very real things to lament about folks; we’re
not talking petty complaints. Many of you this week were made aware of a
horrific spate of recent teenage suicides.

Billy Lucas, age 15, Seth Walsh, age 13, Asher Brown, age 13, and
Tyler Clementi, age 18, have all died at their own hands in the past 2
weeks.Billy, Seth, Asher and
Tyler were queer youth who ended the unendurable anti-gay violence done to them
at the hands of their churches, families or peers by doing life ending violence
to their own selves.And how can
we know of such things and not cry out to God like Habakkuk did in this way:

2O Lord, how long
shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and
you will not save? 3Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. 4So
the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the
righteous— therefore judgment comes forth perverted

You have to admire Habakkuk for just calling a thing
what it is…for calling out God’s people for their injustices against each
other.I love the way some the characters in the old testament
really have it out with God – how they confront the Almighty… it’s downright
argumentative.Anymore if we are angry
with God we just give him the silent treatment.But not so with our ancestors in the faith.If they felt there was some serious
neglectful, abusive or absentee parenting from God they…you
know…complained.And their
complaints were not a sign of faithlessness.Quite the opposite really.Their complaints were a sign that they took God’s
promises seriously.

We don’t seem to have retained that part of the life
of faith very well.Maybe our
society’s general lack of covenant keeping diminishes the power of promises
these days.We don’t trust the
promises of the government, we don’t trust the promises of public schooling, we
don’t trust the promises of each other and we certainly don’t trust the church.So, it’s understandably acceptable to
just walk away when things gets
hard.When we no longer enjoy our
partners or our cars or our sneakers, we just dispense with them and get
something better.

So maybe it’s no surprise how easy it is to also
dispense with God when things get tough rather than just have it out like
Habakkuk…. as though it’s impolite or impius to remind God of God’s
promises.To say “you promised…
and all evidence points to the fact that you, God are not following through”.Yet people like the prophet Habakkuk
seemed to stick around in this covenant with God even when things got ugly and
that, my friends, is what this beautiful little book of Habakkuk is about.He’s like “the little prophet that
could”.

And
the central theme of Habakkuk is summed up in verse 4

Look
at the proud!

Their
spirit is not right in them,

but
the righteous live by their faith

The
prophet contrasts the proud whose spirit’s are not right in them to the
righteous who live by faith.

When I hear the term “the righteous” I don’t know
about you, but I honestly think
“Ned Flanders”.It’s easy to think
that the righteous means the same thing as the religious, the pius, the
priggish.But scholars much
smarter than myself agree that “righteous” in these texts is not primarily a
moral category – it’s a relational category.To be righteous then is to rely on God; to trust God; to
speak of God; to lean in to God.Righteousness
then is not as muchabout being
good as it is about having a heart which longs for that which it cannot create for itself…to be righteous is to be a person
- to be a people who are
worked upon by God. To be righteous
is to rely so deeply on God that we refuse to leave. … refuse to look to myself
or to a romance or to a job or to the free market economy to do what only God
can do. Righteous faith takes the promises of God seriously enough to be
unafraid of lament.

Unafraid to cry out to God that the
wicked surround the righteous…the Xenophiobic surround the unprotected
immigrant….the rich tax the poor, the powerful exploit the weak.Unafraid to cry to God why must we
see before us the queer youth who have taken their lives this week surrounded
as they were by hate and violence?Why O God?

And when things get worse and not better Habakkuk
reminds God that “Hey.We are
suffering here.And you are our
God and what do you have to say for yourself?”And he waits. When God promised a vision to Habakkuk, the
prophet doesn’t go about life as usual.he waits.he lurks. he
annoyingly and conspicuouslydoesn’t leave. To be righteous is to hold God’s feet to the fire in the
midst of sufferingand say “You
promised”.

This is what it means to be a people of God’s promises. When I promise my kids that I will take then
out for ice cream after we get all of our errands done… do they just never
mention it again and forget all about it by the time afternoon rolls
around?No they do not.you know what they do?They bug me. endlessly.They emotionally pull on my pant
leg.They often will say Mom, do
we still get to go out for ice cream even if I don’t clean all my room?What if I clean my room but don’t take
out the trash?As though
collective bargaining works for a 9 and 11 year old.

But here’s where the promises of God are
different.The promises of God to
which we cling are made and given completely apart from our own
righteousness.Christ does not
promise us that where two or more are gathered he will be there, you know, IF
you have all managed to be really good this week.A promise from God is made and given based on God’s
righteousness alone.Which, by the way, is a bit more
reliable of a resource than my own righteousness.God’s
righteousness is good news. God cares for this world God created— cares enough
not to let our folly and hate and brokenness spoil it forever. because this a
God of resurrection.

So, the righteous who live by faith are not the good
people who, because of their goodness are blessed by God, but those who live in
reliance to this God who is present not only at times of joy but also in times
of real suffering.So we lean into
the promise that God makes all
things new even when it doesn’t seem like that is happening.And when these promises seem so far
from being realized, then Faith is just how we live in the meantime.And
sometimes faith is simply the courage to lament.Faith is speaking the names of Billy,
Seth, Asher and Tylerand
refusing to let go of the promise of a world made new by a suffering God. Hear
how our prophet Habakkuk,ends his
book:

Though the fig tree does not
blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and
there is no herd in the stalls, 18yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. 19God, the Lord, is my strength

10Now he was teaching in one of the
synagogues on the sabbath.
11And just then there appeared a woman with a
spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and
was quite unable to stand up straight.
12When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said,
“Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”
13When he laid his hands on her, immediately she
stood up straight and began praising God.
14But the leader of the synagogue, indignant
because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There
are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be
cured, and not on the sabbath day.”
15But the Lord answered him and said, “You
hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his
donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?
16And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham
whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage
on the sabbath day?”
17When he said this, all his opponents were put to
shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things
that he was doing.

We know very little about the woman who was healed in
our text today.The text is silent
on the question of why was she healed and others weren’t. We don’t know why she
bore the pain and humiliation of a bent back.Perhapsmodern
physiologists might be able to give a diagnoses, you know, now that we know SO
much about human beings.Perhaps
the source of her crippled physique was chiropractic in nature, perhaps a lack
of calcium.Medically there’s only
conjecture on our side of the 2,000 years that separate us from her.

None of us may have ever experienced the spinal
reality of such a thing but The infirmity of the woman who was healed in our
text for today seems spiritually familiar
doesn’t it? Because her collapsed posture is the physical representation of
being se encurvatus en se…, the self curved in on the self which,
incidentally,is Luther’s
definition of sin. Myopically unconcerned for anything but the self and having
no thought for God or the neighbor.In other words, bent in a manner in which we see
nothing but our own feet. We can come by it naturally – embodying the messages
we receive from society and our families and our selves – that we are not thin
enough, smart enough, rich enough, like our sister enough, or enough enough.This can just bend us in.Then add to it our cultural obsession
with the self and the notion that we are our own Gods and the result is a
deformity of identity.One
particularly insidious example being our inability to forgive ourselves for not
being God.For not being God!For making mistakes and getting things
wrong and not hitting the mark. Hard to say which is worse – trying to be God
for myself, or punishing myself for not managing to do something that isn’t actually
possible in the first place.. What bends us over so that we see only self are
the voices from inside or outside that try to overpower the sound of God naming
us as God’s own.

It’s hard to say what it was like for her that day
when everything changed.We think
of this text in Luke as a healing narrative but really it was nothing less than
an exorcism.Well, that and
another opportunity for Jesus to pick a fight with the nice religious folks
since all of this happened on the Sabbath.In all fairness the leaders of the synagogue were just doing
their job when they said to the crowds that it was the Sabbath day of rest and
not a time for healings.But see,
Jesus does not violate the Sabbath by healing her.He fulfills it.By healing her he actually does Sabbath TO her.He physically embodies in her what
Sabbath is, namely a time for putting aside our handiwork so that we might
witness the handiwork of God.She
is passive, in the midst of the faithful where she is restored to an upright
position, no longer turned in on herself and is named as a Child of God’s
promises.That sounds pretty
sabbathy to me.

After
she is seen, touched, and healed by Christ, she is named by him as a daughter
of Abraham and restored to the dignity and wholeness of being a child of the
promise.You know, this is the only
place in the Bible where the term daughter of Abraham appears.Here Jesus places her in the history of
God’s promises.And the promise to
which she has claim...the promise to Abraham was not that his children and
children’s children would be super rich and important and fabulous…the promise
to Abraham was that his descendants would be a blessing to all nations.The good news for Abraham had little do
with himself and had a lot to do with God’s love for the whole world.

So
this daughter of Abraham is blessed to be a blessing.She encounters the Christ and For the first time in 18 years
stands upright and praises God not because she got what she wanted but because
praise is simply the consequence of wholeness.

Here’s where we finally learn what the
purpose of her healing was.The
purpose of her healing is not fulfilled when she stands up straight and it’s
not fulfilled when she is named and it’s not fulfilledwhen she praises God.The healing is completed when the
community witnesses new life in their midst and rejoices.In other words, her healing from God
had less to do with her and more to do with God’s love for the whole world.

Having
seen God’s mercy in the upright body of this daughter of Abraham, the community
rejoices for having God in their midst.Right there in the mess of their broken lives and fractured hopes and
crippled bodies.Right there in
the midst of the hypocrites and religious legalists. There is where God shows
up.

It’s
the same for you actually.Your
encounter with God’s grace has a purpose.Your being freed from the tyranny of self has a purpose.Your being acted upon by God…being made
whole has a purpose:and it’s not
so that you can collect higher self-esteem and a sense of well-being in order
to Spiritually feather your nest.God does all of this for the good of your neighbor.It’s always been like that with
God.You know why God gave us the
10 commandments? Because God demands obedience?So that you will be happy?nope.Because
God loves your neighbor and would prefer you not steal from them or sleep with
their husbands.

Having
been restored by God, having been healed of being bent in on herself, this
daughter of Abraham then bore Christ into her community.So if you too have been freed from
bondage,if you have been shown
selfless love,raised from the
dead, restored to wholeness it is for the benefit of the community.Don’t keep it to yourself.Because like the bent woman, you really
are blessed to be a blessing.

This
week I asked you to email me examples of where God is healing you where you
feel free and where you still feel bound.So, as an experience of doing Sabbath to each other hear now where God
is at work.

(Stuart)
God has given me freedom from caring what people think about me... For
many years I was stifled in my life because of my inability to do anything
without a concern for what other might think. What other people
think (as they judge me and put me down) doesn't matter... I know
more than ever God loves me as I am.

(Jim)I feel healed from fear and judgment
but I still have a ways to go

I
feel healing in the ways I view myself and the ways in which I used to judge
people. I still can often feel crippled, though, by the way I was raised -- the
small, narrow mindset and the limitations and fear.

(Mark)
I feel freedom and bondage often in the same places. When I am
freed, healed, and acted upon by God, the first thing I am tempted to
do is to return to the sites of bondage, crippling and brokenness to
"do it right" now that I am "fixed”

(Mary) I
tend to see God freeing me, healing me, and acting in my life precisely where I
feel bound, crippled, and broken. They’re not really different areas for me, I
guess.

And it’s
all got to do with intimacy with God and others… How to live deeply from my
heart in relation to God and others without freaking out, peeing my pants, or
running away.

(Richard)
God is freeing me from self-doubt; slowly. As I increase in faith, I
seem to decrease in self-doubt but not necessarily theological doubt (if
that contradiction can be reconciled let me know)

I
am still bound by addictions of ego, which are harder to shed. The desire
to be important is a hard one to shake and seems to be a fellow traveler to
self-doubt. God is healing me in my ability to experience and give love.
To trust in love and risk love.freeing me (gradually) from worrying about what everyone else thinks,
and being more bold and courageous about what is important and loving and good
- things I need to stand up for.

(Aram)
I think I experience God most IN the brokenness - when I'm honest and real.
Its the areas where I think I'm strong where I'm tempted towards
atheism.

(Megham)
Intellecutally, I believe in grace and therefore in the radical idea that
mistakes are okay and we have to act on our best understanding in a given
moment. But I still bind myself by not permitting mistakes. So, where God
has freed me, I bind myself. Grace vs. perfectionism.

God's
loving presence carried me through a dark time and has taught me that God calls
us into community.

7When he noticed how the guests chose the places
of honor, he told them a parable.
8“When you are invited by someone to a wedding
banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more
distinguished than you has been invited by your host;
9and the host who invited both of you may come and
say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you
would start to take the lowest place.
10But when you are invited, go and sit down at the
lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend,
move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who
sit at the table with you.
11For all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
12He said also to the one who had invited him,
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or
your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may
invite you in return, and you would be repaid.
13But when you give a banquet, invite the poor,
the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
14And you will be blessed, because they cannot
repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Anyone
else think it’s weird that Jesus, the same guy who eats with prostitutes and
tax collectors and whose disciples don’t wash their hands is suddenly teaching
what amounts to a lesson in table manners?

This
church had one of our first
weddings yesterday.John and Maria
Gathered with family and friends to exchange their vows of marriage.Then they threw a great wedding feast.
So it’s ironic that today we hear Jesus tell us a parable about how to act at a
wedding feast since clearly some of you could have used that lesson before
last night.It’s pretty sound advice too.He teaches us that hey, if you’re invited to a wedding
feast, don’t just go up and sit at the reserved head table because, if you do,
the host might have to come and re-seat you where you belong so that then one
of the A-listers can take their rightful place at the head table. And let’s
face it, that’s pretty humiliating.So, take the bad seats Jesus says, the ones behind the pillar and next
to the kitchen that way the host will come and say “what are you kidding?Come sit with the other special,
important people up front where you deserve to be”

.Because as he says, those who exalt
themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

I
started wondering this week: how far down the table would I voluntarily sit if
I knew that the reward would be the head seat? Hoe many
of us out of pride would choose the highest seat knowing you show up more than
others, you have more education, more hippness or you just work harder than
them, so you deserve it.

Or how many of us wouldchoose the lowest seat not out of pride or scheming but out
of feeling inferior to everyone else, feeling worthless and less-than compared
to others which, lets face it, is kinda just the other form of narcissism.Or maybe you’re like me and would love
nothing more than a seat right dab
in the middle so that I can feel more humble than the entitledpeople at the head of the table and
superior to pathetic rif-raf at the bottom of the table.I like my snottyness to be able to go
both directionsyou know, if at
all possible.

So
is this reading from Luke’s Gospela lesson in table manners ? …or is it the secret for how to secure a
higher status than those around you through the use of false humility. At least
those are the take away message if we choose to read the Bible like a how-to
guide, or an answer book… orlike
it’s Joel Osteen’s how to have your best life now. But the
Bible quickly defies our attempts to domesticate it into a divine reference
manual. For instance, on the surface today’s reading might sound like Jesus is giving us a lesson in etiquette or
social climbing.But maybe there’s
more to it, because like British theologianN. T. Wright astutely observes, "Jesus didn't come to offer good
advice”.Andlet’s face it: we can get that from
Oprah.

What we may want from the Bible is advice and easy
answers but what we get instead is truth.Truth about us and truth about God.

And that’s why this teaching from Jesus is a parable.It’s not a lesson in manners or getting ahead or
how to improve your status. Besides, to read parables as instruction on how to
behave is like using riddles to get directions to the airport. Parables were
just Jesus’ way of stretching our minds around who we are and who God is.
Because in the end I don’t think Jesus cares about manners or false
humility.I think Jesus cares
about what we base our worth and our identity on.And we are
fools when we think that we can offer God anything that would ensure our place
at the divine banquet, and this includes our modesty.

I think maybe the truth of this passage has to do with the truth about actual
humility.For
as CS Lewis reminds us,“true
humility is not pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men
trying to believe they are fools.” Lewis suggests that God wishes us to be like
a skilled architect who designs the greatest cathedral in the world. Yet does
not glory in the greatness of the cathedral any more or any less than if it had
been designed at the hands of another.”
True humility then is not trying to pretend you’re not skilled or intelligent
or a gifted musician.Humility is
to see that all these things come from God and not from us.All of it: Mathematical genius and
Money and the love of children and the ability to grill the perfect brat and
great dance moves and peaches and that coppery light at dusk and weddings and
new jobs and the fact that we get to live in Colorado.It’s all gift.We didn’t earn these things. They are
from God.Humility is knowing that
what we have is a gift not an entitlement, and we hold these gifts for the good
of all of God’s beloved children.So your wealth may be your neighbor’s answer to prayers for daily bread
and perhaps your wealth is the answer to this very community’s prayer for
sustainability.Your intellect is
a gift to a world reaching toward inspiration.Your home is a refuge to those who long to be loved and
fed.The time you spend serving
the poor is the answer to God’s longing for justice.

Humility then is treating all of it as though it is
from God.Especially our
identities.In the end your
identity…your seat at the divine banquetis not forged from the steel of social climbing and clamoring for
position but from the waters of your baptism.This is not a false humility you must manufacture to get
ahead in life.It’s not an answer
to finally getting what you think you deserve.But it is the truth.Because you are given what you need to be whole.It is a gift.It is from God. it is never, never at
the expense of another. and it simply cannot be taken away.

The fact that there is a table at all… the fact that
there is both this Communion table and the divine banquet points not to our
entitlement at being honored but the gracious and socially transgressive nature
of the kingdom of God in which finally there is no clamoring for position. We
will be utterly disappointed if we come to this banquet in search of a strategy
to gain power and privilege at the expense of our neighbors. For our host, the
God who beckons us to the cross, is not actually invested in our upward
mobility. Your status and identity is in no way contingent on where you are
relation to others.No, this
God, this Jesus the Christ, cares too deeply to be manipulated by human
scheming. He has not come to promote you, but rather to resurrect you. And
sometimes that resurrection takes the form of the Christ whispering in your ear
“don’t listen to any other voices who try and tell you who you are. come.you belong at the head table” and when
you follow him you realize that it’s the only table.And you are seated between Glenn Beck and Martin Luther King
Jr.And maybe that’s just how terribly
beautiful God’s kingdom is.

Last Sunday I had the honor of preaching at the rite of reception/re-installation of 7 GLBTQ Lutheran clergy in San Francisco. My denomination changed its policy in August, now allowing GLBTQ clergy to be in life-long, monogamous, publicly accountable same-sex relationships. We've taken the closets out of the church. 6 of these pastors were ordained through the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries - an ordination process which exactly paralleled the ELCA, waiting for that day last August when the ELM pastors could be received onto the the ELCA clergy roster. The 7th, Ross Merkel, was re-instated onto our roster, having been removed 20 years ago for being gay. Ross Merkel is also the guy who made me a Lutheran to begin with. His congregation, St Paul Lutheran in Oakland is where it all began for me. Here's the sermon which starts with that story.

The Gospel:

Matthew 20

20“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner
who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
2After agreeing with the laborers for the usual
daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard.
3When he went out about nine o”clock, he saw
others standing idle in the marketplace;
4and he said to them, ‘You also go into the
vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.
5When he went out again about noon and about three
o”clock, he did the same.
6And about five o”clock he went out and found
others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here
idle all day?’
7They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’
He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’
8When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said
to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning
with the last and then going to the first.’
9When those hired about five o”clock came, each of
them received the usual daily wage.
10Now when the first came, they thought they would
receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.
11And when they received it, they grumbled against
the landowner,
12saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and
you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and
the scorching heat.’
13But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am
doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?
14Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to
give to this last the same as I give to you.
15Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what
belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
16So the last will be first, and the first will be
last.”

Here's the manuscript:

Grace peace
and mercy to you from the crucified and risen Christ. Amen. To say that
it is an honor to be your preacher today would be an embarrassing
understatement. So I will just say thank you.

I bring you
greetings on this festive occasion from the people of God at House for
all Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado a mission church of the ELCA. House
for All is a liturgical, Christo-centric, social justice
oriented, queer inclusive, incarnational, contemplative,
irreverent, ancient - future church with a progressive but deeply rooted
theological imagination. At least that’s what our website says.

You may not
realize this, but this little mission church is kind of the spiritual
granddaughter of many churches represented here today. Churches like St Pauls and St
Francis. So I’d like to thank you and the ELM 7 for your faithfulness to
the Gospel despite countless obstacles and say that you almost
certainly have no idea how your witness to the Good News of Jesus
Christ has rippled out into this hurt and broken and beautiful world.

Let me explain -
many of the folks at House for All have been hurt by the church in one
way or the other. Several have been victims of so-called ex-gay reparative
therapy at the hands of Christians, some have been told they are not up
to snuff in the eyes of God and needless to say, the vast majority of
the folks at House were not regularly attending a church when they
joined us.

In other words they were just like me in the Spring of
1996. It was 14 years ago that I walked into a Lutheran church for the
very first time. I had not entered a Christian church for 10 years and
when I finally did, it was St Paul Lutheran Church in Oakland. Perhaps
you’ve
heard of it. Well, here’s the thing: I had no desire to be Christian. I
don’t like Christians and they don’t like me. See, I was raised in a
sectarian and fundamentalist tradition called the Church of Christ. Not
the gay-friendly liberal United Church of Christ. Nope. The Church of
Christ - which can only be described as, like, “Baptist-Plus”. Women in
this tradition were not permitted to pray out loud in front of men much
less be pastors. I left that kind of exclusion in the name of God behind
me and was perfectly happy about it.

And yet, despite
my mis-givings
about the church, that Sunday in 1996 I found myself with tears in my
eyes. When I walked into St Paul’s Lutheran church it somehow felt like I
was walking into the kingdom of heaven - there were young people and
old, gay and straight, black folks and white folks and folks who used
wheelchairs. And the worship was so beautiful. I had never experienced
liturgy. I had never heard that kind of language used to speak of God. I
had never heard… the Gospel.

After that first
Sunday I unexplainably
found myself thinking “I want to come back next week and hear those
things and do those things and say those things again” And before I even
knew what was happening I started going to Pastor Ross Merkel’s adult
confirmation class. I could not believe I was choosing to spend my
Wednesday nights in the basement of a church of all places…yet there I
was.

I had at this point been clean and sober for 4 years following
just the tiniest little drug and alcohol problem. God had literally
interrupted my life and plucked me off one path and put me on another
bringing life out of the death of this Sinner/Saint. So when Pastor Merkel taught
me that God brings life out of death, that we are all simultaneously
sinner and saint; when he said that no one is climbing the spiritual
ladder up to God but that God always comes down to us; when he said that
God’s grace is a gift freely given which we don’t earn but merely
attempt to live in response to…well, when he said all of this, I already
knew it was true.

I had undeniably encountered God’s grace when I
got sober and now I was hearing a historically rooted beautiful
articulation of what I had already experienced to be true. It’s what we
like to call Lutheran Theology. And It changed everything.

Those classes…
and Ross Merkel’s
gracious acceptance of me… and my hearing the gospel …and receiving the
Eucharist at St Paul’s was how God again simply came and got me. It
felt like the Kingdom of Heaven and I fell in Love with this whole
Lutheran thing. It was like that 5 minutes of a movie where the couple
is gloriously ignorant of each other’s short comings and are vapidly
skipping hand-in-hand through a field of wildflowers ….because you know
as the viewer that as soon as the montage ends some kind of awful is
gonna happen. The Lutheran church was so different from the conservative
Christianity of my youth and I was so happy to have discovered
something so beautiful – and so different from the church of my
upbringing.

So when I was soon told that Ross Merkel had
actually been removed from the clergy roster because of a policy in the ELCA
prohibiting partnered gay folks from serving as pastors I was
devastated. It felt like the rug of hope that the church might actually
be something beautiful and redemptive was pulled out from under me. This
Lutheran thing isn’t
what I hoped after all. Because these Lutherans are just as bad as
everyone else. Yet in his humble wisdom Pastor Merkle
reminded me that God is still at work redeeming us and making all things
new even in the midst of broken people and broken systems.

For the kingdom
of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire
laborers for his vineyard. 2After agreeing with the laborers
for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. You already
know how the rest of the parable goes. The landowner goes about hiring
whoever happens to be hanging out at the marketplace all day. And when
everyone is paid the same wage, when the landowner makes the
slept-till-noon new hires equal to the upstanding early risers who
worked all day in the scorching heat, well…things get ugly.

You gotta love a
kingdom of God parable in which the citizens who make up the kingdom of
heaven are completely unlikable and entitled and whiney. Don’t
you picture the Kingdom of Heaven as more like a thing where everyone
wears sandals and flowing white linen? Wouldn’t people in the kingdom of God
appear more, I don’t know, spiritual? Wouldn’t people in the kingdom of God
have that sheen of serenity and calm which is not unlike having taken a
couple doses of Xanex? Nope. Apparently the Kingdom
of God is like a cruddy work place filled with type A personalities
whose sense of entitlement would rival that of Paris Hilton working
alongside slackers who take smoke breaks and earn what money they have
through scratch tickets.

What kind of off-brand kingdom is made up
of this kind of people?

God’s kind. Because here’s the
thing: what makes this the kingdom of God is not the quality of the
people in it. The kingdom of God is like a glorious mess of a kingdom
where Paris Hilton and Hilton Perez and Fred Phelps and Fredrick Beuchner and
ELM pastors and Core Lutherans all receive the same mercy we never saw
coming because we were too busy worrying about what everyone else is
doing.

What makes Lutherans blessed is not, as I thought,
that they’re somehow different from the people in the Church of Christ
where I was raised. What makes us all blessed is that God comes and gets
us, dumb as we are; smart and faithful as we are; just as we are. Because
the kingdom of God, is founded not on the quality of the people in it
but on the unrestrained and lavish mercy of the God who came and got us.

Our gospel text for today is not the parable of the workers.
It’s the parable of the landowner. Because what makes it the
kingdom of God is not the worthiness or piety or social justice-yness or hard
work of the laborers…it’s the fact that the trampy landowner couldn’t
manage to keep out of the market place. He goes back and back and back
interrupting lives…coming to get his people.

Like a parent
throwing a wedding feast God goes out into the street and just grabs up
any old wretch. Like a sower who just wantonly, wastefully casts
handfuls of seed, God just CAN’T seem to be discerning. Like a father
who runs out into the street to embrace his wasted betrayer of a son,
God simply insists on coming to get us. Insists on making all things
new, insists on ripping out our old hearts and replacing them with God’s
own.

And anytime we think that this kingdom of God is just
for the nice people, or the ones who are ethnically Minnesotan or the
ones who really really believe it; anytime we think this thing is just
for the liberals who are open and affirming or the ones who protect the
Confessions, we become blind to God’s making all things new work. Work
like the unexplainable fact that I am now in a clergy small group with a
Church of Christ preacher who is my brother in Christ and friend and
colleague.

This is the kingdom of heaven breaking in on us. A
kingdom where yes, the people are somewhat questionable, but which is
defined by the mercy of a God who is revealed in the cradle and the
cross.

And so, Paul, Jeff, Craig, Dawn, Megan, Sharon and Ross… know
this: The Kingdom of God is also like right here right now. The kingdom
of God is like this very moment in which sinners are reconciled to God
and to one another. The kingdom of God is like this very moment where
God is making all things new…even this off brand denomination of the ELCA. Because
in the end, your calling, and your value in the Kingdom of God comes
not from the approval of the other workers but in your having been
come-and-gotten by God. It is the pure and unfathomable mercy of God
which defines this thing. And nothing. nothing else gets to tell you who
you are.

From what I hear, if you are taking a trip to the Holy
Land you can visit the actual road from Jerusalem to Modern day Jericho and
local tour guides are happy, for the right price, to show you the exact spot
where the Good Samaritan helped the Man found beaten by thieves.Many an earnest Christian has paid for
such an “authentic” holy land experience before remembering that the Good
Samaritan was just a parable.

But it’s one of the biggies…along with the prodigal
son, this parable of a beaten and robbed man being shown mercy by a Samaritan
is ingrained into the cultural memory of even those who have never stepped foot
into a church.There are laws
named after it.Long term care
facilities named after it.Even a
Boy Scout Merit badge named after it.We KNOW this story.And as
happy as I am that at least some of the Bible is part of our cultural
mythology, it actually makes it that much more difficult to hear these stories
with new ears.It can be hard to
hear the real power of this story precisely because we’re so sure what it
means…when we already know the moral of this story, which is “it’s good to be
helpful”.But I guess I started to
wonder this week if maybe the teachings of Jesus have a little more to them
than say,the flimsy moralisms we
learned from “a very special episode of Saved By The Bell”.Maybe the story of mercy being shown to
a beaten and robbed man has much more to it than “it’s good to be helpful”

Yet
even we when manage to get beyond the Girl Scout merit badge moralism of this parable
I think we tend to hear it as Law and not Gospel. And as you’ve heard me say
before, when all we have is law-
when all we hear is demand from God’s Word and not promise we have exactly two
options – under the law, there is only either pride or despair.

So maybe at certain times we hear the parable of the
Good Samaritan with a self-congratulatory ear knowing that we actually do care
for those in need.Unlike other
people – people who make much more money than we do -We actually do
give dollar bills to the homeless guy with the cardboard sign on the corner of
Speer and Broadway.Unlike the
religious right,who pass by
without crossing the road, we do
selflessly help widows and orphans cross the street.So if the way to inherit eternal life is through acts of
charity then we might hear the story of the Good Samaritans and then cast
ourselves in the role of the social justice hero. So there’s pride.

Which means the other way we might tend to hear the
answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” is to
think of all the times we failed to give the card board sign guy a dollar.the times we thought only of ourselves
and failed to be the Good Samaritan.the times of selfish regard every one of usexperience. We hear about the
unbelievable goodness of the Samaritan and all we can do is be ashamed of all
the times we failed to help an old
lady across the street. so that once again Jesus just sits there disappointed
in us because we have failed to be good.And there you have despair.

If the moral of the story is that being good is the
path to salvation, then in this parable eternal life is granted to the
Samaritan as a reward for his good-ness.We have even given him this as his first name.He is the Good
Samaritan to us even though he is never called that in the text.It’s easy to hear the point of this
parable being that the Samaritan is good so we should be good in order to
inherit eternal life.

But if anyone was saved in this story it was not the
one who managed to do the right thing.The one who was saved was the one who couldn’t manage to do ANYTHING
because he was half dead in a ditch.I’m fairly certain that, unlike the lawyer who asked Jesus the question
in the first place,the man who
lay robbed and beaten in the ditch was NOT trying to justify himself.He was not laying there attempting to
be good enough to be saved… and when the nice religious people passed him by
not willing to get their hands dirty or their schedules delayed, the man in the
ditch laid there helpless while someone he absolutely despised cared for his
wounds.Was the man in the ditch’s
salvation dependant on him in any way what so ever?No. Because if we go back and look, Jesus told this parable
in response to the question who is my neighbor? not in response to the question what must I do to
inherit eternal life?

Perhaps life abundant comes not from our ability to be
“good” but in our having received mercy. Because, honestly, God isn’t
interested in making you a better person.God is interested in making you a new person.Because
if this whole thing was only a matter of self-improvement then trying harder
should do the trick in which case we basically we don’t need Jesus anymore.

Being
better people – being good er Samaritans is something we can do on our
own.But to become new people we need God. To become new people we need a God who daily drowns our old dying
selves in the watery graveof
baptism and raises us to new life.To be new people we need a God who has conquered death by death. A God
who offers us a way where there is no way.Becoming new people is what this whole Jesus-following thing
is about and it doesn’t happen though trying harder to be good.It comes by being robbed.robbed of our old ideas about
ourselves.Robbed of our
self-sufficiency.Robbed of our
piety or despondency.

And becoming new people comes from being beaten.Beaten down by the impossibility of
perfect self-improvement.Beaten
down by the bondage of resentment and entitlement.Beaten down by a society in which we are never ever
enough.And from the ditch where
we lay unable to rise to the occasion, unable to do for ourselves, unable to
justify ourselves, unable to choose our mode of healing …our salvation comes
near us in the form of the last thing we’d expect.The neighbor of last resort.The one in this parable who receives new life is not the one
who managed to be really super duper merit badge good.The one who was made new was the one
who received real mercy.real
grace.And here’s the thing.As Richard Rohr says, “once you have
received real grace…real mercy… you are no longer in the position of deciding
who the so called “deserving poor” are”.So my guess is that the one who received mercy from his enemy is the one
who was made new by God…not made good by God…made new.And when we die to our old ideas…when
we exhaust the possibility of being right about something and are left with
nothing but pure need – this is when we are changed by God. The good news is
not that you can be a better person if you just try harder so that then Jesus
won’t have to keep being disappointed in you.The good news is that you can be a new person.That indeed you are being made a new person by God. And wait till you get
a hold of who God is making you into.because it might just look like God is making you into a person who has
experienced real grace and real mercy and who cannot help but come near to the
one who lays robbed and beaten-
God is making you into someone who shows mercy not out of your goodness, but
out of your newness.And new
people are what all Jesus’ best stories are about.

There has been a fair amount of conversation at House for
All Sinners and Saints recently about the use of inclusive language for
God.Now, in all fairness I should
say that I have really no problem with using “In the name of the Father, and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen” in liturgy.It feels solid and ancient and beautiful. I use “Creator,
Redeemer and Sustainer” as well, but it kind of clumsily reduces God to a job
description.Having said that, I
must admit that I do, however, have a
problem with the exclusive use of the male pronoun when speaking of the
Almighty.I have the same problem
with the exclusive use of the female pronoun whenspeaking of the Almighty.Here’s why: While we as humans are limited in our ability to
understand and speak of God, I think we might do well to admit that how we
speak of God impacts how we speak of each other.In other words, we naturally are going to use
anthropomorphized images; it’s almost unavoidable to conceive of God as having
human attributes. But there are several dangers with this.One, we tend to make God in our own
image by projecting human attributes like control, vengeance, and power-over
onto God and then we worship our projection.Pete Rollins in his book How (Not) To Speak Of God puts a fine point on this by calling it “conceptual
idolatry”. By taking some aspects of being human, blowing them up really big
and calling that God we in turn attribute God-like-ness to humans with those
same characteristics.I believe it
was Mary Daly who said “If God is male then male is God”.This is all pretty boiler-plate
feminism and not in any way original to me (and honestly I’m kind of a lousy
feminist). But here’s what really got me thinking recently – in certain
Christian circles prayers so often go like this, “Father God, we just praise
you for being our Father.We just
thank you for being such an awesome Father God….”.So in effect we are attributing to God a human trait (in
this case, male-ness). The problem is that we are attributing to God a human
characteristic that only half of us share.So growing up, I basically heard “God is male, but you are
not.But little Jimmy over here
is!”So humans who have the trait
“male” are made in the image of God.Humans who do not have the trait “male” are not.It’s like if a little blonde child
heard prayers like this for their whole lives: “Dear red-headed God, We just
want to praise you for being such an awesome red-headed God….”“Dear able bodied God, Dear North
American God, Dear penis-having God, Dear (enter something human that only some
of us share here) God”.It
makes you realize why the Hebrew people called God Ha-Shem, meaning – The
Name.Anything else is fraught
with danger.

ps - i know Jesus called God the Creator, "Father" but if you need to leave that in the comments, go ahead.

36One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and took his place at the table. 37And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. 38She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. 39Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him — that she is a sinner." 40Jesus spoke up and said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." "Teacher," he replied, "speak." 41A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?" 43Simon answered, "I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt." And Jesus said to him, "You have judged rightly." 44Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. 45You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. 46You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. 47Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little." 48Then he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." 49But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" 50And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

“Do
you see this woman?” Jesus asks.

Um,
the one crying and wiping your feet with her hair?She’s kind of hard to miss. She is not invited.She is not male. She is not behaving
properly and she is not about to stop.

Luke serves us up a tasty story today.The ingredients may remind us of the
stories in Matthew, Mark and John of a woman who anoints Jesus feet in his
final week of life.But cleanse
your palate of those stories.This
one in Luke, set near the beginning of Jesus ministry has a very distinct
flavor.

It reminded me of our Easter vigil in 2009.It was our first big event and I was
nervous.I wanted to make sure
everyone was comfortable. I wanted everything to go well and knowing there were
going to be a lot of visitors I wanted us to look good.Then HE
came in. Homeless, stinking of liquor and murmmering under his breath. He was
not invited.He was not sober. He
was not acting properly and he was not about to leave.The hope of everyone being comfortable
and us looking good went out the door when it opened to let him in.And when I say he was not about to
leave trust me on that.He
stayed.He stayed through the
readings and the litany and prayers and baptism.And then he stayed through the post-vigil dance party.At one point while our uninvited guest
was actually teaching Judah some moves on the dance floor, Andie comes up to me
and says “O my gosh.Do you think
maybe that’s Jesus?”To which I replied,
“yeah.I’m pretty sure”.Then when the dance party ended Jesus
stayed to help clean up.We loaded
him up with the left over crackers and bite size brownies and said farewell. We
having been changed by an uninvited guest who loved much.

Do
you see this man? Jesus asks us.I’m not sure, because sometimes our
ability to really see others is hindered by our need for them to reflect
something about ourselves. As
though we don’t really see them as much as we see ourselves in relation to
them.

In our Gospel reading for today, Simon the Pharisee,
an upright religious man, has Jesus the prophet over for dinner. Perhaps Simon
was wondering how Jesus might commend him for his religious observance.Perhaps he was preoccupied with how he
was being perceived by his guests…with how this dinner party was reflecting on
him…when SHE shows up.With her bangles and hair and
smelling like oil.As though
she has no shame whatsoever. As though she has completely forgotten what
category of woman she is, she just barges in.

So Simon of the category “Pharasee” takes one look at
this woman of the category “sinner” and thinks that Jesus must not be of the
category “prophet” or else as the text says,Jesus would know whowhat kind…what category of
woman is she.

Of course Simon’s absolute certainty
about this particular woman’s sin begs the question “how DID Simon know what
KIND of sinner she was?” Perhaps he has one hand extended to her in accusation
the other hand extended in payment for services rendered.

It’s like if we had a dinner party for our version of
Jesus wondering how he might commend us in our coolness and creativity and
liberalness we sit in our jeans and ironic t shirts listening to Sigur Ros and
eating sushi with Jesus.When SHE
walks in.And ruins everything.
SHE is not young.SHE is not
cool.SHE is not behaving properly
and SHE is not going to stop.Where will our progressive emerging church reputation be with the likes of
this business woman hanging out here. With her Armani suit and hermes scarf and
oil on her hands.As though she
has no shame. As though she’s forgotten that she is of the category “BP
executive” she cries at the feet of Jesus.And we have one hand extended to condemn the BP executive,
while the other reaches again for artificially low priced unleaded.It’s what we do.

The
important thing about knowing who the identified problem in a family or church
or community is, knowing who the so-called “real” sinner is is that it
conveniently keeps the heat off of us. Being clear about the taxonomy of sin is
quite useful.It helps us know
what Kind of people we are.It helps us know what kind of people they are while helping us determine our
place in the spiritual meritocracy. But it’s hard to pull that off when people like Homeless Jesus Of The Dance Party show up and won’t
stay in the category, “those less fortunate than ourselves” but instead insists
on teaching us to dance.

It’s exhausting.
Maintaining the categories of a spiritual meritocracy.Yet we use categories, however damaging
they may be, to finally understand ourselves.We have internalized the very things that demean us, but
somehow we cannot escape their siren song.We go back to them for comfort and assurance of who we are.
We constantly seek the approval of categories who will never yield the kind of
forgiveness and wholeness that we seek.Some categories we occupy are flimsy and can easily be escaped with
time, distance, ora good bottle
of Clairol. Nobody is forever sentenced to being seen as a C student in High
School.But some categories are
like enforced steel.Once you’re a
felon or the winner of American Idol, or the guy who holds up the John 3:16
sign at football gamesyou’re
always that person to everyone you
meet, and finally to yourself.Other categories are less visible. They
are like little shrimp nets in our souls and were usually placed there when we
were young. You can’t see them from the outside. They come from words like “you’re
not straight enough for the church, you’re not wealthy enough to attract a
partner, you’re not hip enough, smart enough, pius enough, thin enough or enough enough.These are the categories we spend
our whole lives attempting through dieting, workaholism, sleeping around,
drinking too much and therapy to prove wrong or prove right.Either way.It’s still bondage.

Do you see this woman? Jesus asks.The woman of Simon’s dinner party who showed much love as the uninvited
guest…her whole existence and identity is bound in a reinforced steel category
and yet she so clearly has escaped.TO behave with such bare and embarrassing physicality – to show such an
elicit lack of restraint by covering Jesus’ feet with your tears and hair and
kisses is to be nothing less than a free person.And free people are what the Gospel creates. So to say
she is shameless is exactly right.Her shame given by others and
reinforced by herself is gone …replaced by what is finally the only real
category in the presence of Christ: that of forgiven, beloved, named and claimed child
of the Most High God.

Because when we encounter Jesus, categories tend to be
rendered useless.Instead Jesus
says come to me you who are heavy laden with sin and shame and the bondage
of categorizing and being categorized and I will give you rest.For
only in the wideness of God’s mercy can we finally stop spiritually holding in
our stomachs.Here we exhale with
all the other forgiven sinners and broken saints and rest in the Grace of a God
who claims us without category. Do you see yourself in that?

11Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." 14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" 15The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" 17This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

As awkward as this feels, I need to admit that a
friend of mine kinda wrote this sermon.Some of you know that Hans Peterson, a good friend of mine died 2 months
ago in a work related accident. Hans was this compact little distance runner
with white blond hair and a smile so bright that even the very best clichés
couldn’t describe it.I had coffee
with Hans while I was in San Francisco 2 weeks before his death and part of me
still can’t believe he’s gone. And a really big part of me doesn’t understand why
he’s gone.

But this past Monday night I dreamed of Hans.It was one of those dreams so real it
takes awhile after you wake up to realize it was a dream.We were just sitting around chatting
like normal when all of the sudden I remembered he had died.I walked up to him, kissed his scruffy
blond cheek and said “Sweetie, I’m so sorry you’re dead.” To which Hans simply
looked me in the eyes and replied “It’s ok.I lost myself in a collision with God’s grace.”Then I woke up.

It’s
ok that I’m dead because I lost myself in a collision with God’s grace. I have
no idea what that means.But I
think it’s beautiful and maybe true.So it feels like Hans wrote this sermon on the Widow from Nain.

We only hear of her in Luke’s gospel, this Widow of
Nain.She is a nobody from a
nowhere. What we know is that her husband has died.What we know is that she has but one son and now he too is
dead.What we know is that without
husband or son she has no real place in society.Without a man to define and defend her she is now barely
visible.And it is from this
nobody status in the midst of her grief for her dead son that she is joined by
the townspeople in a funeral procession.

Of course the entirety of the Gospels is about this
Jesus of Nazareth.What we know is
that he was born of an unwed virgin.He is a nobody from nowhere.What we know is that he has left his mother and her
guardian.He has left his home and
siblingsand has no real place in
society.It is from this status of
outsider that he has gone about the country side healing the sick, raising the
dead and always touching things he shouldn’t in blatant disregard for biblical
teachings .And he is joined
everywhere he goes by the crowds and hangers on in a march of mercy. This day
is no different.

For it is on this day that the childless
widow of Nain isjoined by a
swarming crowd of townspeople in a funeral march as they move toward the city
gate - her dead son carried on a plank of wood.Walking with the crowd I imagine her looking up to heaven
and wondering why has God abandoned me?Where now is my God? Knowing that there is no one left to protect and
provide for her I imagine her questioning why this had to happen.From her isolation in the midst of the
throng she searches the heavens for answers to why God has abandoned her. Yet
the crowd keeps moving.

Meanwhile coming toward her,a crowd followingJesus makes their way closer and closer to the same city Gate.They just keep following this God-man
who heals on the Sabbath, insists we should love our enemies and then backs
that ridiculous claim up by raising a Roman Centurion’s servant from the
dead.Like flash mob of grace this
great multitude following Jesus move from outside the town toward inside the
town while at the same time a great multitude of the funeral procession move
from inside the town to outside the town. Like an epic battle scene, two great
forces, two formidable armies move Braveheart style toward one another.

I wonder if the crowd following Jesus that day knew
they were about to collide with a death march?I know that we ourselves make such brave attempts in our
death-denying culture to avoid the inevitability of death.As though we can all live forever with
the right combination of positive thinking, herbs, diet, exercise and elective
surgery.Then when death happens
we wonder, like the Widow of Nain, where is our God now?

But
here’s the thing:as she walked
with the multitudes in a march of death searching the heavens for answers, she
suddenly walked smack into God in the flesh. Death and Grace collided.

And
at the moment of impact Jesus sees her.He sees this husbandless childless
widow and the text says he has compassion on her - only that’s an unnecessarily
polite translation of a Greek word which means something closer to “his guts
churned for her”.He looked upon
this woman who has lost everything and his reaction was intestinal in nature.

And at this same moment of impact the widow does not
receive answers to her questions.But she receives God’s own self. We too might have a lot of questions in
our grief and isolation and despair but the faith is not where we find answers
to questions.The Christian faith
is where we have a collision with God who insists on being in the places we are
sure are God-forsaken.Andrew Root
says that “Christianity is faith in a God who enters death”

See,
Jesus can never seem to just keep a safe distance from death and impurity. The
funeral procession and the march of grace collide, he sees the widow, his guts
churn for her then he totally ignores the rules in the Bible and reaches out
and touches the wooden plank holding the dead body of her only son.Jesus defiles himself by touching
death.Now ritually impure, Jesus
hands the young man back to his mother foreshadowing when he will give his own
mother a new son from the cross.So in this collision, rather that Jesus fighting death, which death
would expect, he simply touches it.Like on the cross, Jesus enters death as though to say “I will even be
found here… death will not keep me from you.I will not stand above this earth indifferent to your
despair and dying.I will reach
out and touch death itself.”

So as we might either deny our mortality or despair in
the inevitability of it, Jesus is being present in it – having been the one to
take on death mano y mano. And he continues to pull life out of death in a
gut-churning compassion for the world.

So
while people keep dying and life keeps happening and questions keep forming,
maybe the church, Christ’s body on Earth, need not pawn ourselves off as some
kind of answer dispensary when what people really need is God.But as
Christ’s body may our guts churn
for those who suffer and may we extend our own hands to touch what the world
calls impure for the sake of compassion.And may our outstretched hands point to nothing but the light that
shines in the darkness - a God who comes to us in cradle and cross touching
death until it too rises to new life.Because God brings more life than
answers.

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? 2On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; 3beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: 4"To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. 22The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. 23Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. 24When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. 25Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth — 26when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. 27When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, 29when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 30then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, 31rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

Happy Holy Trinity Sunday…or as I like to call it: Unexplainable
Church Doctrine Sunday.

This
week I began to realize that it’s kind of perfect that Holy Trinity Sunday fall
right after Pentecost.Because the
early followers of Jesus had just experienced the absolute whirlwind of his
ministry on earth.And after the
dust and confetti of Pentecost had settled to the ground and after the tongues
of fire had been extinguished they had to have looked at each other and said
“um…what just happened?” After years of following this Jesus of Nazareth they had
a few questions … because they had
seen the seemingly impossible with their own eyes: paralyzed men walking
strong, dead little girls sitting up and having a snack. At the time they were
simply caught up in the sweeping a-rationality of it all. And when it finally
settled down a little I think they started to do a bit of what we like to call
“theology”.

You are all theologians you know.If you have asked questions about God
then you are a theologian.We like
in the church to try and confine theology to seminary class rooms…taught by
approved people and to approved people but I’m here to tell you that if you
have spoken of God, then you are a theologian.Congratulations.But don’t get too excited you know,it doesn’t pay well.

Anyhow,
the poor disciples had no time while it was happening to try and makes sense of
it all but I’m pretty sure that they started asking some difficult questions
not long after Pentecost.

And the question that haunted the disciples wasn’t the
obvious one.The question that
haunted them wasn’t “Was Jesus such a good guy that he was like God?”The question that cooked their noodle
was “Could it be that God is like Jesus”Because I suspect that the concept they had of a wrathful angry God
didn’t exactly mesh up with how they experienced Jesus – who was, you know…an
actual human being.They wondered
what does it mean that God refused to be confined to some remote heaven …
refused to just politely stay seated on a throne of harsh judgment removed from
the distastefulness of humanity - but instead came down and became incarnate as
a baby born from a human woman.

And so the early church did the only thing they could
do: they searched their scriptures for help with how they might understand such
a mystery.They only thought they understood God.But then this Jesus thing happened which changes everything. Yet this is what the people of God have always done:
with questions in hand we search the scriptures for how to make sense of all of
it.We, like our 1st
century brothers and sisters read the Bible and do theology together.

This week I read the Lady Wisdom text from Proverbs to
Jim who, as many of you know, grew up in a very conservative evangelical
context. I read it to him and he was scandalized.Saying “Whoa.Wisdom as a woman who was the first of God’s creation?” he said “Why
didn’t I ever know that was in the Bible?”

Probably
because the crazy thing about Sophia (the Greek word for wisdom) the crazy and
beautiful thing is that to a lot of readers over the last couple thousand years
the figure of Sofia in these passages is actually Jesus. (although in all
fairness some think that Sophia is the Holy Spirit while to many she remains
something embarrassing that we just try and pretend isn’t really in the Bible)
But some believe the Wisdom of God that is personified as the perfect woman is
also the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Word of God made fully human
and know to us as Jesus of Nazareth.

I totally understand why some people don’t like this
idea as it’s mixing up the linen and the wool and the pork and the milk and the
lady-parts and the man-parts and generally just messing with our heads but
Jesus confused our precious categories from day one so in a way it’s kinda
perfect. You see, while Jim and maybe some of you had never heard of Sophia
from Proverbs it’s certain that the writer of John’s gospel did know it and
knew it well. Listen again to proverbs and think of those first disciples
reading this text with questions in hand searching to understand what they had
experienced.

Does
not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?

5

The
LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long
ago.Ages ago I was set up, at the
first, before the beginning of the earth.Then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his
delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world

and
delighting in the human race.

Delighting
in the human race.Not wrathfully condemning the human
race…loving them.So then what
does it say about the human race if Sophia dwelt with God and God said “go. Go
and make your dwelling with the people in whom you rejoice”

It
was actually decades after that first Pentecost that the followers of Jesus
began to write things down.Having
searched their scriptures with questions in their hands trying to make sense of
the Christ event they finally wrote down what they learned. Here’s how John begins
to tell the story see if you don’t hear Sophia.

In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.

These early followers knew that if Jesus was man and
also God that this changed everything so together they searched their
scriptures together. And all the while there was within their hearts this
driving Spirit saying, “Keep going! The God you’ve always longed for is the God
you have! The God who looks like Jesus is God the Father”

All of a sudden the things that the disciples had
always known about God just didn’t quite fit. These people soon theologized
askingWhat does it mean that God
would have a body? These weren’t abstract theoretical question which don’t have
anything to do with real lives.These questions about Jesus were also questions about what it means to
be human. Because if like us salty tears would come out of the eyes of God…if
God’s skin could also sunburn, if also God could throw God’s head back and
laugh inappropriately loudly? If God became flesh then what does that say about
my flesh? If God could have a human body then maybe we should not hate our own
bodies . Maybe if God had a body then we should begin to see all human bodies as sacred.

If Jesus ate with roust-abouts and prostitutes and
with the bureaucrats no one liked and he seemed completely unworried about how
such unbounderied love and acceptance might look to the respectable folk. …If
this Wisdom of God made flesh told sacred stories about mundane things like
dirt, and if the Jesus always insisted on touching impure people then what does
that say about bureaucrats and lepers and dirt and human women and prostitutes
and all the other things we assumed God just as soon stayed far away from?

These are the questions I hope we have in hand as we
search our scriptures to make sense of this world which is held in the love of
a Triune God.Because as we do
this work of theology and reading the Bible together, we do so while there is
within our hearts this driving Spirit saying, “Keep going! The God you’ve
always longed for is the God you have! The God who looks like Jesus is God the Father.”And yes, that changes everything.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 5Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" 13But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."

There were several events of monumental
importance that happened in 1492.But there is one event of 1492 that, at first glance seems to lack
significance but in reality altered the entire course of history.For it was in that year that the Spaniard Antonio de Nebrija
entered the chambers of Queen Isabel of Spain and handed her what he called the
key to their dreams for a Spanish Empire.It was a weapon. A weapon which had no
equal and it was not made of steel or gun powder…. it was made of paper.It was the first book of grammar.When handed the book Queen Isabel
famously said that she knew the Spanish language quite well and had no need for
such a book.To whichAntonio replied“Your Highness,language is
the greatest tool of empire”.

And one has only to look at the 21 Spanish language
countries that exist now.. over 500 years later …to know that he was
right.And one has only to look to
the language laws of Germany in the 1930s and 40s and of South Africa in the
mid 40s to the mid 90s… not to mention the English-only legislation in 28
states in our own country to know that there are few more potent markers of
identity than language.Language
is powerful.

In
Barabara Kingsolver’s novel titled the Poisonwood Bible, one of the main
charaters, Reverend Nathan Price is an American missionary to the people of the
Congo.Failing to understand the
nuances of their language and insisting on the primacy of the King James
Translation of the Bible he proclaims to them that Jesus is Bangala! Thinking
he was saying that Jesus is supreme.Of course the villagers simply looked confused since what he really said
was Jesus is Poisonwood – meaning Jesus is a noxious plant.But since the King James was the only true translation of the Bible, he refused to substitute
another word.

The problem is that while there may be one Gospel…one
story about God-with-us, God becoming human and healing the sick and feeding
the hungry and being killed for it all and then defeating death itself….while
there is this one story,there are
countless ways of understanding it.There are countless images and words and music and culture which serve
to tell that story.My friend Sara
just came back from 3 weeks in a Christian area of Karala India…she told me
about the Indian Christian art from the 8th and 9th
century which depicts Jesus standing in lotus flowers and Jesus with two
peacocks on either side of him representing his human and divine nature.This isn’t Indian art which happens to
be Christian, it’s Christian art which happens to be Indian.

See The problem comes when we hear the Gospel in our
own language, our own culture, our own art and then proceed to conflate or
confuse the Gospel itself with the form in which we understand it. I really believe that God came and got
me through the Lutheran liturgical and theological tradition.I had already in my life experienced
the fact that I am simultaneously sinner and saint, the fact that God’s grace
is a gift freely given to me.I
had already experienced the fact that I can’t make my way to God but that God
always comes to me.So when I was
exposed to this Lutheran stuff I thought “well, of course! I’ve already
experienced all of this to be true”I felt like God led me to the thing that would make sense to me.

What becomes problematic is then assuming that the way
I understand God is the only way God
can be understood correctly.What becomes a problem is when I insist that there is one language in
which the Gospel can be preached and it just so happens to be the language, or
the art or the culture I understand. I’ve then confused the ethos and the
logos….the wrapping paper with the gift.

In this Pentecost
reading from Acts we hear that there were those from every nation living in
Jerusalem…you know that weird list which included Parthians, Medes, and Elamites.The point is that Jerusalem under Roman
occupation was a multi-cultural scene.We are told that there were people living in Jerusalem from every nation
who gathered around when they heard the sound of the Spirit’s mischief that
Pentecost morning….that morning that things got seriously strange.When these people from every
nation gathered they heard these Galalain followers of Jesus tell of God’s
great deeds of power.But they
heard this in their own native languages.in their native tongues.Here’s the thing…if they were living in Jerusalem they all
would have, to some extent, spoken Greek, the language of the Empire. An empire
which spread it’s language and power and culture over 3 continents. They surely
shared a common language.Yet the
Spirit scoffed at using the language of imperialism and dominance.The 120 original members of the church
very well could have communicated to those from every country living in
Jerusalem in Greek, but instead the Holy Spirit chose to reveal the truth about
God’s great deeds of power in Medeish and Parthianese and Ebonics and Spanglish
and slang and in the Queens English and in Arabic and Farsi and on and on.Because language is powerful. And God
just kind of comes and gets us through whatever means and whatever language
necessary. The text reads:

“In
our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power”

Before
Jesus left his disciples he told
them about this day. “Power will come over you” said Jesus, “when you receive
the Holy Spirit.”And in the
Gospel reading for today we hear that this is a Spirit of Truth…..to receive
the Holy Spirit is to receive the power of Truth.And yet no one single language or culture or denomination or
tradition has sole ownership of that truth.There is a Sacred Promiscuity to the Holy Spirit.And I find it endlessly irritating that
God’s redeeming work in the world isn’t politely limited to the language and
theology and means that I happen to agree with.But for a long time in the church we have acted as if we
have sole ownership of God’s Truth.As though it’s only truth when stated in the language we understandwhich, by the way,you must conform to.But that’s not what we hear about
today.The Kingdom of God is not
an empire which haslanguage
laws.We humans may exercise power
through Imperialistic conformity laws.But God doesn’t.“In our
own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power”

God
comes to get you by whatever means necessary.So today let’s be part of a Pentecost which celebrates how
God communicates through languages we don’t understand and by theology and
means with which we don’t agree.Because that means that God comes also to us.By any means necessary. Even hillbilly music. Amen.

All the Christian archetypes were already in place on the very
first day.

The
story opens with that small group of believers isolating themselves all
together in one place …Like in John’s
gospel when they were all gatheredbehind locked doors, as the text says for fear.Fear of
the people who didn’t get their church.Fear of impurity.Fear of
reprisal.Fear of dilution.They were afraid of other people
so they all stayed together. Had they actually known better they would have
been even more afraid because what was about to happen would have freaked out
even the bravest amongst us. The danger they were in wasn’t from outsiders – it
was from a God who is about to crash the party and bring in everyone they’re
trying to avoid.

And
here we all are still, just like at Pentecost.See, we still have fear and isolation in the church. It’s
called sectarianism.So nothing’s
changed there.And those people
who did the whole crazy speaking in tongues thing that frankly I don’t really
get…well, there’s the Pentecostals.Nothing’s changed there.And then thefirst time
people started speaking in tongues there were probably also the polite people
who know better than to lose control in ecstatic religiousity. We call them
Presbyterians I believe. Nothing’s changed there.Then that long list of how many different nationalities were
present was of course added by the first UCC’er or other good liberal flashing
their multicultural credentials.Nothing’s changed there.Then there were those who witnessed this powerful act of God---this
Pente-chaos--- and, in an attempt at intellectualizing the experience of the
faith, all they could think to say was “well what does this mean”. So they were
like, the first Lutherans.Nothing’s changed there.

And those who said“They are drunk on new wine” must have
been some Evangelicals focused on the personal morality of others. Nothing’s
changed.Then finally
there’s the nice but completely naive guy who says” O come on there’s no way they can be drunk…it’s only 9 o clock in the
morning”So there we have what we
call the Methodists.Nothing’s
changed a whole lot.

People
are people. There are the emotional ones, the judgmental one, the naïve ones,
the proud ones and of course the ones like myself who insist on categorizing
and naming everyone as though people can be reduced to a label. I mean honestly…it’s
ridiculous.

So there we all are even from the
beginning.Flawed, smug, confused,
embarrassed and embarrassing…and the very people to whom God sends the spirit. Because see,God hasn’t changed either. Just like that first Pentecost God still
messes up our plans and interrupts our pride.

Ikon from Belfast did a theo-drama thing at Greenbelt last year which included this piece being read by Shirley McMillan. It was written by Jon Hatch and includes some colorful profanity (for once not my own)

It takes Phylis Tickle's Rummage Sale idea one step farther.

The clerical child abuse scandal within the industrial schools run for
decades by the Catholic Church in Ireland have for years been an open
wound for many Irish people, whether they be Catholic, lapsed Catholic,
never-Catholic, or would-be Catholic.

Now, thanks to an
independent government report that has thrown light onto the devastating
full scale of the child abuse-

over 800 known serial abusers;

over
200 Catholic institutions;

over 35 years;

abuse not
accidental, sporadic, or opportunistic;

not a tragic failure of
the system, but, horrifically, the system itself-

we understand
why the scandal is being referred to, I believe without an ounce of
hyperbole, as ‘Ireland’s gulag’ and ‘the map of an Irish hell."

Reading
the Government Commission documents (and I have read them), I feel as
if I have stared the antichrist full in the face. I feel that I now know
why someone as compassionate as Jesus would suggest such a cruel and
unusual use for a millstone. I have never been so sad, sick and enraged.
I feel the inner scream that many Christians have heard ring in their
heads when their fellow Christian’s fingers have been found stained with
the shit of the Crusades, anti-Semitism, martyrs, slavery, imperialism,
Auschwitz, Rwanda, unwanted Irish children, or simply a failure to stop
the destruction of the ‘least of these’, whether they were across the
world or down the road.

In the case of these decades of unwanted
Irish children, many now in their damaged middle age, The Church’s
reaction has been, I believe, the very embodiment of the word
‘inadequate’. There has been silence, and where there has not been
silence there has been noise; obfuscation, platitudes, and
rationalization, making many of us, heads cradled in our hands, beg,
please in the name of Christ will you SHUT UP AND FUCK OFF!!!

What
would happen if, as one, The Church said, “We have sinned; we are
sorry; we humbly repent, and as penance, we will shut ourselves down,
collectively give up our vocation, sell all we have and give it to the
poor and the abused. God forgive us. God bless you. Goodbye”?

The
Church would end.

But through its self-destruction, through this
self-immolation, I wonder if, in time, the Church might be reborn.

I
believe that many Irish men and women who had abandoned the Church for
decades, dumfounded at this sudden moment of... I don’t know,
Christianity?- would say, “That’s what I’ve been yearning to hear.”
Those of us who weekly drag our own selves dejectedly to the 11am
Service of Holy Eucharist, now that there wasn’t one to drag ourselves
off to, might feel a new stirring.

Over time, as has happened on
these islands for millennia, men and women would feel the call of God.
They would pray and they would serve. They would heal each other’s
bodies and souls. They would to meet together over bread and wine and
feel God in their midst. And each morning, as the first of us did, they
would face the rising sun and worship the three-in-one, singing,

“As
it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be.”

And they
might think of keeping a sledgehammer, a can of petrol, and a box of
matches readily at hand... For the next time.

Here is a link to the post: http://mistertumnus.blogspot.com/2009/11/irelands-gulag.html

Here's what I think is emerging at HFASS....here's where I
envision God calling us to be (some of these things already exist and
some are yet to)

I envision a vibrant community which averages 80-100 in
worship. The leadership within the church is undertaken by many people
based on what they are passionate about. We have maintained the
participatory nature of our liturgy while more people work to created
it. Writers write the prayers, musicians create music, artists adorn
the worship space. It is a place that celebrates
the arts in all its multiple facets from music to painting to stain
glass windows to poetry, dance and sculpture – both to engage in faith
and just to celebrate life in general. There’s
always food. People laugh more than anyone would expect in a church.
We see the promise of narcissism, which is ever present in our consumer
culture, for what it is: a lie. So we do the radical thing of showing
up even if it is not the thing we want to do in the moment because it
may meet the needs of someone else (not out of obligation or guilt, but
out of freedom). Those drawn to more of a whole-life faith undertake
praying the hours together. A small group gathers for sung Matins each
day. We are known in the community for being purveyors of whimsy and
mystery. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We glorify the
stranger. We insist on the gospel. We sing our hearts to God. Who we
are changes with everyone who joins us or leaves us but what we are
about is constant. We gather around Word and Sacrament. We respond to the needs around us. We relish in
subversive generosity. We pray our asses off. We know what other
resources are available in the community so that we can refer people to
them. Work is joy because we do it together and for the sake of God.
We retreat twice a year. Children help create and participate in
worship. We respond and adapt. We are nimble yet rooted. We have a
good reputation amongst those who are usually suspect of the church.
New people are given a meaningful place in the community. We point to
nothing but Christ and him crucified.

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against
the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 2and asked him for
letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who
belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to
Jerusalem. 3Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus,
suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4He fell to the ground
and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute
me?" 5He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom
you are persecuting. 6But get up and enter the city, and you will be
told what you are to do." 7The men who were traveling with him stood
speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. 8Saul got up
from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so
they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. 9For three
days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. 10Now
there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a
vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord." 11The Lord said to
him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of
Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is
praying, 12and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and
lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." 13But Ananias
answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he
has done to your saints in Jerusalem; 14and here he has authority from
the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name." 15But the Lord
said to him, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my
name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; 16I
myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name."
17So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and
said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way
here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with
the Holy Spirit." 18And immediately something like scales fell from his
eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized,
19and after taking some food, he regained his strength. For
several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, 20and immediately
he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, "He is the Son of
God."

John 21

9When they had gone ashore, they saw a
charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10Jesus said to them,
"Bring some of the fish that you have just caught." 11So Simon Peter
went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred
fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not
torn. 12Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." Now none of the
disciples dared to ask him, "Who are you?" because they knew it was the
Lord. 13Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the
same with the fish. 14This was now the third time that Jesus appeared
to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. 15When they
had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John,
do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know
that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my lambs." 16A second time
he said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" He said to him,
"Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Tend my
sheep." 17He said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you
love me?" Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you
love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that
I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. .... After this he
said to him, "Follow me."

A reading
from Acts chapter 7: While they were stoning Stephen he prayed “Lord
Jesus receive my spirit” then he knelt down and cried out in a loud
voice “Lord, do not hold this sin against them. When he had said this
he died. And Saul approved of their killing him.

I’m not so sure that the really miraculous thing about
Saul’s experience happened on the road to
Damascus…sure the pure drama of being blinded by a light and hearing a
voice from heaven is great material for a Cecil B Demille movie… but
for me the real miracle took place after he
arrived at Damascus. Saul (which was his
name before he changed it to Paul) well, Saul, we are told, was
breathing threats and murder. The very oxygen entering his lungs was
self-righteousness and a drive to purge what was impure out of the
religion he excelled at.

He was present at and indeed approved of the stoning of
Steven, the first to be killed for following Jesus and now Saul had
secured the full support of the religious authorities in Jerusalem to
hunt down other followers of Jesus, bind them and deport them to
Jerusalem where they would stand trial and likely follow their brother
Steven in martyrdom.

They had been warned, those Jesus followers in Damascus
that Saul was coming. They were understandably afraid and likely angry
that their fellow Jew was hunting them down.

I know I would avoid the
guy at all cost were I in that situation. So when Ananias heard in a
vision that he was to go and actually seek out the guy he’s trying to
avoid, he had every reason to pull a Jonah and go the exact opposite
direction but he didn’t and the result changed everything. The event of
Paul’s own transformation may have started on the road to Damascus but
it couldn’t actually take hold until someone else’s conversion could
take place. Because Paul didn’t really have new eyes until the death and
resurrection of Ananias’ own fear. You see, conversion, if we are going
to use the word, doesn’t happen in private. It happens in community.
Paul’s transformation didn’t really happen until Anninias, one whom
he persecuted, laid hands on him and called him brother. This act
of forgiveness and reconciliation was I think so powerful that the
scales on Sauls’ eye could not help but fall. The old way of seeing did
not stand a chance in the face of such undeserved mercy and
reconciliation. He laid hands on Saul and called him brother…and it was
perhaps the perfect sermon. Our brother Annanias had experienced the
risen Christ and believed that God can raise the dead. Even Saul.

Much later in the book of Acts, Paul will stand before
King Agrippa and recall again his transformation that started on the
road to Damascus and Paul will ask “Why is it thought so incredible to
any of you that God can raise the dead?”

And all I can think of is
“Do I think it so possible that God can raise the dead that I am willing
to see it even in the person who I’ve written off so completely. Can I
believe it possible that God can raise the dead that I am willing to
see it in even the most despicable parts of myself that I’ve written off
completely? Look at Saul. He was arrogant and forceful … a manically
driven ideologue and God goes “I could use someone like you, you Saul
will be my instrument. I will use your annoyingly certain personality,
your rhetorical brilliance and your passion all the things you used to
persecute me I will use to lift my name" says the Lord

See, conversion doesn’t mean a change in personality.
Just a change of purpose. And that purpose is to be purveyors of life
abundant. The kind of life offered in the crucified and resurrected
one. The kind of life abundant that only comes from receiving and
giving forgiveness and reconiliation that the secular world will never
ever stand for. There is no justice as we understand it in a man
seeking out his persecutor laying hands on him and calling him brother.
I’m fairly certain that I cannot muster up that kind of reconciliation
on my own. But Jesus says you don’t have to. Jesus says “I’ll go
first”. Before he is even dead on the cross he asks God to forgive
those who put him there. He lays hands on his own deniers. Goes so far
as to make a grilled fish breakfast for them. He goes to his
persecutors and brings peace. And what allowed Anninias to lay hands on
Saul and call him brother, what allowed Steven to ask for the
forgiveness of Saul and the others who killed him is that they had been
made Easter people. Because Jesus had said It's ok. I'll go first.

In our Gospel text today
Jesus says to Peter come and I will feed you around the very fire
from which you really boffed it. I imagine
Peter’s olfactory triggered memory of another charcoal fire. A charcoal
fire on the night of Jesus' arrest around which Peter warmed himself
with his own self-protection and fear. Denying his Lord and warming his
hands. And now the risen Christ offers him a grilled fish breakfast on
the beach. Jesus kind of snacks his way through the gospels even after
he’s died and come back to life. As a side note I’m kind of amused by
the academics (The Jesus Seminar) who have clever little explanations
for everything in the Bible…like that Jesus didn’t really rise from the
dead…it’s just that his spirit and memory were so powerful to his
followers that when they were together that it almost felt like he was really there. “Yeah, remember when Jesus was
dead but his spirit was so strong that it felt like he grilled us some
fish on the beach? Man the memory of that guy can really make a
delicious breakfast!” So I may be naive and superstitious but I
actually believe that Jesus was there in the flesh grilling fish because
seriously, doesn’t that just sound like something a guy who was accused
of being a drunkard and a glutton would do if he came back from the
dead?

So he makes a charcoal fire
and cooks breakfast for his friends including Peter his denier. And he
does such an unbelievably loving thing and gives Peter 3 chances to
proclaim his love. 1 for each of his denials. Do you love me Peter?
With the smell of charcoal in his nostrils I wonder if Peter could
answer yes without tears in his eyes. I have failed you Lord and
denied you in your hour of death despite everything in me that knew it
was wrong but yes. 3 times yes. I love you Lord. How could he not
be overcome with the pain of undeserved mercy and a second chance. This
mercy was not tender, it was a blunt instrument. This is a forgiveness
that kills the thing which wronged it. The part of Peter who denied
Christ dies at the blow of the blunt instrument of undeserved mercy and
something new is born. It is the Peter who has encountered
resurrection. He sees differently. Scales have fallen from his eye and
he is now an Easter person. And Christ doesn’t skip a beat. He
creates these Easter people because frankly he has an agenda. Feed my
lambs. Tend my sheep. It’s called the great commission. Follow
me he says. It's ok. I'll go first.But go and be what
you have received. Practice the forgiveness and reconciliation I bring
to you. Because there’s a spreading of the Gospel that can only
come from a forgiven sinner like Peter and Paul and me and you. And we
are an Easter people.

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had
come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his
own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
2The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper
3Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God,
4got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.
5Then he poured water into a basin and began to
wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied
around him.
6He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”
7Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
8Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”
9Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
10Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not
need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are
clean, though not all of you.”
11For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
12After he had washed their feet, had put on his
robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what
I have done to you?
13You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.
14So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.
15For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
16Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.
17If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

34I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
35By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

At our Maundy Thursday liturgy we had
an individual absolution following the confession; people came forward,
I laid my hands on them saying "In obedience to the command of Christ I
declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. Amen".
Everyone had their feet washed and then in turn washed the feet of
someone else. In addition, we assembled safe sex kits for
http://www.praxus.org/ to be handed out on the Denver streets to
homeless youth, IV drug users and sex workers. We did this as an act
of love and because God loves us where we are and as who we are...not
just after we've washed our own feet.

Sermon:

In John’s Gospel the Word of God became flesh and dwelt
among us. God’s own self scandalously slipped into skin and moved into
the neighborhood. He called to follow him blue collar illiterates,
bureaucrats and prostitutes. He turned water to wine, and wine into
blood. He raised the dead, healed the sick and fed the hungry. And
he wept.

The question of “Who is this man” followed him everywhere. He called
himself the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate, the good
shepherd, the resurrection, the true vine, the way, the truth and the
life. And none of this helped anyone figure him out…not really. He
infuriated the religious establishment and confused his disciples. Then
after the conspiracy to kill him had begun but before he was betrayed
and arrested he was at dinner with his faltering friends when he got
up, put the towel of a servant girl around his waist, and washed their
feet speaking of love and death and glory.

Then he asks this question “Do you know what I have done to you?”
Do you know what I have done to you he asks.

Well, he’s done something or else you all wouldn’t be here. Something
has happened that has made us followers of Jesus. I know a lot of you
and understand that you quite justifiably have every reason not to be a
part of a Christian community. Several of us have tried to leave but
somehow the Christ event is centrifugal. Something has happened…But
what? And why does he ask this now after washing the feet of his
friends….Friends like James and John who will be unable to stay awake
and pray with him before his death, Judas who will betray him, and
Peter who will deny him.

What has Jesus done to them, to us? He’s met us with dirty feet. God
was made man and walked among us – walked among the despised and
wretched – the rich and haughty and did so – does so – when we are
unclean. The love of God comes to us not when we’ve managed to clean
ourselves up a bit…not when God is good and sure that we believe all
the right doctrine, but here, now, when our feet are dirty. He kneels
before us in love and says here’s what I’m about. Here’s the only
doctrine you need…God pouring out God’s self and saying now you do the
same…. don’t be ashamed of your dirty feet because I will touch them …
I will change you.

This following Jesus thing is not a kind of personal dirt management
program. Which is what it feels like the church has so often been
about . Rather than live into the discomforting and radical reality
that God is loving us dirt and all, the church has chosen to make it
all about worthiness. We’re like, experts in this. Only those who are
worthy may receive Christ at communion – you have to be baptized or
baptized in the right church or you need to have confessed first or
agreed with our pure pure doctrine. Basically you must have thoroughly
cleaned your own feet before sitting at Jesus’ table. And let me tell
you…this whole church as sin management program thing started about 20
minutes after the first Christians gathered together. But we miss the
point when we try managing our stuff in order to be worthy of being in
Christ’s presence. I guess I wonder if a guy who is willing to take off
his cloak, wrap the towel of a servant girl around him and wash the
filthy feet of his friends who are about to betray him is a guy who
would start a religion based on the shame and worthiness of those he
loves? He asked nothing of them but to love each other dirt and all.
After all, the dirt is inevitable and not the result of anything but
our journey as the broken. To not have the dirt is to not have been on
the road at all. Dirt is simply the inevitable experience of the
ambulatory. Yes we too need to be washed of the buildup of being simply
ourselves in the world. As Jesus tells Peter, we are washed in God’s
grace and yes entirely clean yet still in need of washing off that
which has clung to us, the dusty daily remnant of brokenness. But just
the feet, and it comes off pretty easily, with the hearing of the Word,
with the nourishment of Christ’s body and blood, with the proclamation
of forgiveness, with the power of reconciliation. It comes off of us
in beloved community. This community gathered around Water, Bread,
Wine. It comes off not because we are worthy or have managed to gussy
ourselves up for Jesus, but because he has done something to us. He
has come to us while our feet are still dirty and said “let me take
care of that.”

He kneels before us in love and says here’s what I’m about. Here’s the
only doctrine you need…God pouring out God’s self and saying now you do
the same… don’t be ashamed of your dirty feet because I will touch
them … I will change you.

He commands us to love in this same crazy way. It is by this, he says,
that everyone will know that you are my disciples: By this, he says,
everyone will know that you are my forgiven Christ betrayers: if you
have love for one another; not Hallmark greeting card love but If you
have Agape for one another. Agape, the derivative love which is only
possible from the indwelling of God’s spirit. Agape one another. Not
try and manage a deep fondness for the irritating. Not try and create
warm feelings toward the unlikable, the socially awkward, the unlovely.
Jesus knew better than to imply that if his followers could only muster
up enough niceness they would be up to the task of following him.

Jesus shows us what this love actually looks like. He shows us divine
humility and service. He kneels before us in love and says here’s what
I’m about. Here’s the only doctrine you need…God pouring out God’s
self and saying now you do the same. don’t be ashamed of your dirty
feet because I will touch them … I will change you. Amen

28After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
29When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples,
30saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and
as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been
ridden. Untie it and bring it here.
31If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’”
32So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them.
33As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”
34They said, “The Lord needs it.”
35Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.
36As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.
37As he was now approaching the path down from
the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to
praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that
they had seen,
38saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”
39Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.”
40He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

41As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it,
42saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!

“The
peace of Christ be with you all”

(and
also with you)

It’s
one of my favorite moments in the liturgy when someone offers us a blessing of
peace and we lob it right back at them.The 40 teenagers who visited us a couple weeks back mentioned how moved
they were by the fact that we all mull around hugging and greeting everyone
during the passing of the peace.For all you non-Lutherans out there – the reason they commented on this
is because in the majority of Lutheran churches it looks more like left-right-front-back…sit.It really doesn’t take long.But the youth groups from Iowa kinda
liked how long it takes us to pass the peace.

In
our text today we hear of a passing of the peace…but it took even longer than
it usually does here at House.It
took over 30 years.

37As
he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole
multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for
all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38saying, “Blessed is the
king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the
highest heaven!” Peace in heaven.

I
wonder if this multitude of disciples knew they were basically the second half
of a cosmic call and response?

Because
listen to this reading from Luke Chapter 2

But
the angel said to them, 12This will be a sign for you: you will find
a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ 13And
suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,* praising God and saying, 14‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and peace on earth!’*

Decades before Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem,
The angel describes Jesus’ first triumphal entry – his entry into the wolrd…..
the Christ child wrapped inelegantly in bands of cloth and laying without
dignity in the feed box of a barn animal. This is a sign for you says the
angel. Here’s the Glory of God. Here is God come to redeem the world as a tiny
vulnerable newborn.And then a
multitude of the heavenly hosts say“peace be with you” to us in Earth.

Then in response over 30 years later the multitude of
disciples say back to the multitude of the Heavenly hosts “and also with you”
As this Lord rides triumphal on a donkey into the sacred city of Jerusalem Here
again is the Glory of God.

Here
is finally a king to bring peace.When the multitude of the disciples pass the peace with the multitude of
the heavenly hosts they praise God with loud voices, Luke tells us, “for all
the great deeds of power they had seen”Power.Power to heal the sick, power to raise the dead, power to finally fix
some things up in here.Here is
the king they have been waiting for.The disciples are so over the top with the laying down the cloaks and
the praising God and giving glory for their new king that it all makes me
wonder… did they notice he was on a donkey? …the one who will bring us Glory….the one who will
“fix it” is riding in on a joke on an animal. Yet we wave our branches singing
Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Our triumphant
conquorer, unlike us, is not limited by such things as human weakness and
physics and the Roman empire.With
such power good things…wonderful things can happen.Maybe even peace.

They
blessed heaven and sang Hosanna assuming that Jesus’ power would bring peace.

The shouts of adulation and hope are barely gone from
the air when this King who rides a donkey looks over the sacred city and weeps
saying “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make
for peace!” It is said that in the cultural imagination of the Jewish people,
that Jerusalem is the place where heaven and Earth touch.And as this cosmic drama unfolds it is
more like heaven and earth collide.Our need for a celebrity savior collides with God’s need to interrupt
our plans to bring salvation…even if that means being killed at our hands. So
on this Palm Sunday we stand in the presence of a King who accepts the Hosannas
of his friends knowing they will betray him and then he turns his face to
Jerusalem and weeps.

Stuart told me recently that there are plays and
musicals you can attend where the audience itself chooses the ending.The cast must be rehearsed in a number
of possible outcomes any of which might occur depending on the will of the
crowd.And the will of the crowd
is not to be underestimated. as it so quickly, so easily turns from “Hosanna”
to “crucify him”.

I suspect this is because, as Jesus said when he cried
over Jerusalem, we do not recognize the things that make for peace.Especially when our equation is that
Peace is to be had through deeds of power.We can only make peace if we are more powerful than our
enemies.After all, we are the
country who came up with such things as the Peacekeeper missile.

So maybe it’s not such a stretch to see how
disappointing their king will be to them and ultimately us.This king, this Lord, this Messiah who
refuses to meet hate with hate – who refuses to meet violence with violence. He
simply won’t use our equation of conquering force with force.Instead he voluntarily submits to
treachery and abuse not even lifting a finger to condemn, much less over power,
those who crucify him.

The beautiful Christ Hymn from Phillipans we heard
today puts it like this:

though he was in the form of God, Christ Jesus did not
regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being
found in human form, 8he humbled himself and became obedient to the
point of death— even death on a cross. 9Therefore God also highly
exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10so
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and
under the earth, 11and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

My friend Debbie Blue says “Listen, Glory doesn’t
shine….it bleeds”

The glory of God is found on the cross.It’s as offensive to us today as it was
2,000 years ago.A vulnerable God,
a weeping King, a Helpless Lord.When people ask if I really believe this stuff in the Gospels is true
I’m like, Yeah.Who’d make THIS
up?Nobody would choose this
ending. nobody.because it
simply offends us.But the truth
is that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is his entry into our own dying…our own
vulnerability and it’s hard to have a God who instead of smiting my enemies and
glorifying me chooses to empty god’s self out and take the form of a slave.

You know, the great poet W.H. Auden was asked once why
he was a Christian, instead of a Buddhist or a Confucian, since all these
religions share similar ethical values. And Auden said, “Because nothing in the
figure of Buddha or Confucius fills me with the overwhelming desire to scream,
“crucify him.”

A couple of months ago a Lutheran campus ministry pastor
contacted me.He wanted to bring a
group of 10 college students to HFASS this week which I assured him, would be
no problem.Then I get a call from
him last week indicating that they are combining their trip with another campus
ministry group and there would actually be 20 now.I hemmed an hawed until finally saying that I’d prefer if
they split up as a group…there are some other cool churches to check out in
Denver; maybe 10 could go to The Wilderness at the cathedral.As you all know, we get a lot of what I
call “church tourism”; people wanting to come see what we do but who aren’t
looking to join because they are either visiting from out of town or are
members at other churches.Obviously
we are use to this and actually welcome it unless it overwhelms us and totally
changes what we are doing.

Then yesterday I find out that there is a youth group from
Iowa who is also planning as part of their service trip to come and visit HFASS
this week. And there are 28 of them. Are you kidding me? I thought.At some point the observer changes what is being observed, you know? I
love that people are so interested in our funky little church but it feel like
we are zoo animals if there are more of them than us.I mean, if that many people came we’d have to take down the
prayer labyrinth, and I’m not even sure we have that many extra chairs.Plus, I’m not even there this
week.Matthew is covering for me.

But… then I thought shit.Is radical hospitality about saying “please join us…that is
if we aren’t inconvenienced and we don’t have to change anything from the way
we like it”? So I want you to know that I have repented from my original
impulse to protect and preserve HFASS so that all the people who really belong there won’t feel uncomfortable or
inconvenienced. It’s not our tent.It’s God’s tent. (http://tinyurl.com/y8heo4v
)

So this Sunday yes, we won’t be able to have the prayer
labyrinth and maybe there won’t be enough chairs and maybe it won’t feel just
the way we like it and we’ll need extra cookies and communion bread. And yes,
we will have to change what we do. But I ask that you embrace this holy
interruption.Show up.Meet these people. Worship with the assembly. Gather around
a bigger table than we have ever had.You never know when you may be entertaining angels.

Church planting is it's own weird thing. It takes a certain personality to think you might, just might, be able to (with tons of help from God) start a church from scratch. There is a somewhat particular constellation of personality traits needed for such a task. These traits may allow one to be suited for church planting but be horribly ill suited for many other things...let's not pretend otherwise. So at the risk of sounding like I'm indulging in self-flattery let me attempt to list some of these traits.

a church planter usually is:

self-motivated

creative

charismatic

independent

connecting

can inspire others to do stuff

responsive and adaptive

someone who can hold a vision of what's possible

OK I'm sure there are other things but these come to mind at 6:30a this morning.

Are these characteristics simply found in more men than women? Maybe...but if so then why? And if not then why aren't more women doing what I do? I bet there are 30-40 church plants of all different ilks in Denver and I am the only solo female church planter I know here.

Here are some reasons I thought of:

*Obviously some Christian traditions don't allow women to be pastors

*There are a lot of women who are married with children who don't have the kind of family and spousal support that I have in my life. (2 of the 3 other solo church planters I know are single women)

*Thinking back to my youth group and other co-ed groups from when i was a teen, it seemed like the really funny charismatic people whose plans and ideas other people got on board with were all male. Young women are not as likely to be rewarded for being that kind of person.

We had a baptism at House for All Sinners and Saints last night. OK, so there are some weird things, some pain-in-the-ass things, some tiring things about being a pastor. But these are entirely over shadowed by the reality that it is an HONOR to be a pastor. I got to baptize a child last night. I am invited into the beautiful and devastating details of people's real lives. I get to be a part of the transitions and joys and sorrows in people's real lives. To be invited into this is an honor and nothing short of. My prayer every day is that I be made worthy of this calling.

Here's the sermon, based on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Psalm 63: 1-8

Ingrid,
child of God, today you begin your baptismal journey.

As
the waters of baptism still glisten on your head may you know this: You had
about the same chance of choosing your God as you had in choosing your
parents.This God has chosen
you…claimed you and named you as God’s own.It’s a wonderful mercy.A wild mystery to have a God who comes down to claim you in
water and the word.

The
promises of God are forever bound to you Ingrid.It’s what we call a “done deal” You can’t escape them.These promises will hunt you down and
bring you new life as you die and are raised to new life again and again in
your baptismal walk.

I
hope this happens for you as much as possible Ingrid; this death and new life
in baptism.I hope when you grow
up that if someone asks you “when were you saved?” You can say “Just again this
morning”.Because you havetoday been baptized into the death and
resurrection of the Christ.You
have been baptized into an entire life of death and re-birth which will daily
be your reality.I hope that you
grow to love metanoia – returning to God.We call this repentance which is Greek for changing your thinking.When you begin to think that you have
the answers, when you think it’s all figured out I hope you experience metanoia…for
in the act of repentance there is the hope of new thinking, new acting, new
life which you simply don’t get when you still think you are right about
something.Don’t listen when
people say that following Christ means being right.To follow the crucified and resurrected one is to live as a
people who get to be wrong – who get to be wrong and die to our ideas our pride
our despair and be re-born to new life in Christ.I hope you are often wrong Inga …so that you might know
deeply this grace of God which makes all things new.Because the baptismal life is a life of returning.

And
all of this from water and the word of God.

I
hope in your life to come that when you encounter water - this common substance
surrounding land and comprising our bodies…I hope when you drink it in; when
you dive deep in a pool; when you wade in a stream; when you play in the rain;
that you know the wild wonder of God’s promises all around you. I hope that
water in your life be a reminder of the promises of God.Promises of new life.Promises that God is with you.Promises that there is more than this
life - and yet the eternal is always contained in the present. I hope you see
how these promises are for the restoration of all creation.When you encounter water, this most common
of substances may you be reminded of this God who is so imminent, so present as
to be the host of a meal in which you and indeed all who hunger are called. May
you see how present God is in water and bread and wine and community – the salt
of tears shed, the leaven of bread shared and the mercy of forgiveness granted.

And when you encounter water, the most
common of substances may you be reminded of a God who is also transcendent…. a
God whose ways are not your ways and thoughts are not your thoughts as to be
the Great mystery of the unknown.

I
hope in this journey you are embarking on that you go often to the words of the
fierce and uncontainable prophet Isaiah.He will serve you well Ingrid.today as this community gathers around your baptism we hear these words:
everyone who thirsts come to the waters and you that have no money come buy
and eat Come, buy wine and milk

without
money and without price.

2Why do you spend your money
for that which is not bread,

and
your labor for that which does not satisfy?

And
Ingrid, when you do spend your money and spend your time and spend your self on
that which does not satisfy, and trust me on this, you will…when you do, you
are still on your baptismal journey.May you see the empty calories of consumerism and Western individualism
for what they are and turn again to your God who today has claimed you in these
waters.May you return frequently
to the abundant and free feast of the Eucharist.When you have crashed from the empty calorie sugar high of self-reliance
may you come often to this table where God offers you and all people the feast
of life.May you not neglect to
gather around the table in the community of Christ with all the other blessed
and annoying sinners and receive that which you are called to be – the very
body of Christ in this hurt and broken and beautiful world.

And
when voices other than Christ’s try to tell you your value and trust me, this
will happen, but when it does may you go to Isaiah who bids you listen so that
you might live.Listen to the Word
of God which claims you as God’s own child. Nothing else gets to tell you who
you are.Nothing.

And
when you feel as though your needs are too great.When you feel that there must be more to life than
this.When it seems like you
hunger for more justice, more meaning, more connection know that you are
right.But know also that your God
placed this need in you.And that
this hunger, this longing is actually what qualifies you to sit at the feast of
God’s table.Lean into this longing
because it is for the one who has called you beloved.

And
then go to the Psalms Ingrid….may the Psalms be your place of comfort and
lament.They have worked pretty
darn well for 4,000 years.Lean
into these songs of your ancestors.You now stand in a long line of the faithful who have sung of their
thirst for God in the words of the Psalms.

my soul thirsts for you writes the Psalmist, my
flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there | is no
water.

My whole being | clings to you;

your
right hand | holds me fast.

My sister in Christ, may your whole being cling
to the one who has claimed you as their own.For their hand surely shall hold you fast.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from
the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,2where for forty days he was
tempted by the devil.

I remember once while I was in seminary I had had a
particularly difficult day which seemed to involve the singularly most annoying
people on the planet all conspiring to make me lose it.My sister called me while I was on my
drive home and innocuously enough asked how I was doing.“Well…I think that if I believed in the
Devil I’d be pretty sure he was trying to get me to be a bitch today”

In our Gospel text for today we read of the Devil
tempting Jesus in the wilderness.And in our post-enlightenment over-educated love affair with human
reason we have almost summarily dismissed the idea of the Devil as beingsimply too superstitious.I too struggle with the idea that there
may be a non-human source of evil.There may not be a pitch fork and red horns involved, but there are forces that seek to defy God in our world.And we are exposed to enough news and
history to know there is evil –
the holocaust, child exploitation, abu graib.We know it’s there and it’s quite easily labeled “of the
Devil”

We are led to believe that temptation is a choice
between good and evil, but the thing about the temptation of Christ is that the
devil didn’t say If you are the son of God then slaughter all your enemies
in concentration camps.The devil didn’t say if you are the
son of God then torture people at will.
Most of us wouldn’t have much trouble turning down such obvious evil….butthe devil said if you are the son of
God then use your privilege to indulge yourself.And when it’s put
that way I think maybe I’m uncomfortably familiar with this, that is….if I’m
willing to be honest.

Maybe the central test here is not if we can avoid
temptations, but is seeing how we’ve already succumbed to them to the extent
that we don’t even see what they are any more.If the Christian Life were but avoiding really big sin then
most of us would have arrived already. Most of us can manage without too much
difficulty to avoid murder, theftand the like.And honestly
we could probably pull that off without too much help from God.Maybe the test for us is not in
resisting the temptation to do some big ugly evil but maybe the test is in
seeing where even the seemingly good has a dark side.And a good way to find where this might be happeningis to see where are we justifying and
defending that which we desperately want to hold on to.In other words, at what point do our
indulgences become entitlements?And at what point do entitlements become needs. And then how do these
false needs become ways to protect ourselves from the pain of being human? And
then how do these protections become such an integral part of us that we no
longer see them for what they are?These are decidedly desert questions.

I think this is the discipline of Lent: to peel even
just the thinnest layer of this insulation away.To remove even a single numbing agent we use to insulate us
from pain or isolation or despair, to insulate us from the desert.

Years ago Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a brilliant
description of why the practice of Lent started.She proposes that when the luster of the early church wore
off and their faith had become ho-hum that “Little by little, Christians became
devoted to their comforts instead: the soft couch, the flannel sheets, the leg
of lamb roasted with rosemary. These things” Brown writes “made them feel safe
and cared for -- if not by God, then by themselves. They decided there was no contradiction
between being comfortable and being Christian, and before long it was very hard
to pick them out from the population at large. They no longer distinguished
themselves by their bold love for one another. They did not get arrested for
championing the poor. They blended in. They avoided extremes. They decided
to be nice instead of holy, and” She adds,“God moaned out loud.”

I
think she’s right.So the church
for hundreds of years has chosen to enter the desert of Lent and remove a layer
of comfort.We give things
up.We look for what we cling to
and we lay it down.It’s a curious
practice among us Christians and this practice is far from perfect.This thing of denying ourselves for 40
days of the year.We give up
chocolate or gossiping or televisionor any of the other forms of anesthesia we layer around ourselves.And it’s easy to think we are doing God
a favor by all this self-denial.Like we are gathering up a big basketful of candy bars and hours on
Facebook to give to God like some bad habit charity drive for the
Almighty.And if there is one less
snickers bar in the basket for God because I succumbed to temptation and ate it
for myself then it’s a Lent Fail.

The point isn’t that God needs our
sacrifices.The point is that we need
God.

This week in struggling with this scripture I kept
wondering what the good news was for us.It’s comforting to think
that Jesus understands suffering and temptation.It’s comforting
to think that God had an almost disturbingly human experience. I’m just not so sure how it’s helpful. Is it helpful to me that Jesus withstood
temptation.Like Jesus did it so I
can too? That just feels grandiose and misguided.

But the point is not to think we can be Jesus and it’s
not to impress God by giving God our candy bars.The point is that we see these insulations for what they are
– namely that which we use to feel safe and cared for, as Brown says, if not by
God then by ourselves. Because that which we are constantly trying to insulate
ourselves from…the harsh desert reality we are trying to avoid through our
anesthesia of choice is actually the very place where God insists on being
present.Because the good news is
that scripture doesn’t say “The Spirit led Jesus to the Wilderness…and then
waited for him in the lobby till he came back out”.

The Spirit of God is present in the desert.In Christ God has come to be present in the things we are trying to
avoid.So as the numbness of
self-indulgence wears offlean
into this God of the desert.This
God in whom we live and move and have our being.As even a single layer of insulation is peeled away know
that you can walk away from it because God actually loves and cares for you.It’s God’s job description.The Psalmist writes of this very desert God

I will deliver those who | cling to me;

I
will uphold them, because they | know my name.

15They will call me, and I will |
answer them;

I
will be with them in trouble; I will rescue and | honor them.

16With long life will I |
satisfy them,

and
show them | my salvation.

May we all see the salvation of God for which we long
which is always present even, or maybe especially in the wilderness. Amen

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

This
week my friend Sara reminded me that the really amazing thing about1st Corinthians 13is that even 100s ofthousands of schlocky wedding and inspirational posters and bad
Christian coffee mugs can’t kill it.Paul’s hymn to Love is perhaps one of the most recognizable texts in the
New Testament.And it is really
beautiful… but it has just about nothing to do with romance.

To be sure, the subject of love is a tricky one.I think because we so often are loved
poorly, loved incompletely, loved conditionally.The subject of love is a tricky one because we so often love poorly, incompletely and
conditionally.And, forgive the
pop psychology, but my theory is that when we are loved so poorly we begin to,
on some level, assume that we are maybe undeserving of being loved well.And from this state of being
loved poorly, feeling undeserving and then loving poorly in return, which let’s
face it, is the foundation of Oprah and Dr Phil’s entire empire….but from this
state we do some stuff that’s…unhelpful.

I’ve been thinking about the things I’ve done in my
life to try and make myself more lovable.I lost weight, I tried to not use big words, I tried laughing even when
a joke wasn’t funny.And when I
was dating Matthew…and those of you who know me will get this, I went camping.I tried
showing the other person only the parts of myself which I thought were lovable
and if there weren’t enough of those parts then I just manufactured some.Because I was sure that to know me…
is actually not to Love me.

We come by this naturally…given messages as we are
about what is ok and what is not.Strong smart girls learn to act ditzy and helpless…tender hearted boys
learn to toughen up.And it’s no
secret that some of these messages insisting on our fragmentation came from the
church.I remember a male Sunday
School teacher in 5th grade taking my parents aside and suggesting
that they insist I stop answering all the questions in Sunday School so quickly
because then the little boys, who really should be answering the questions,
don’t really get a chance.

Richard Rhor has a way of assessing our spiritual
health…namely what do we do with pain.Do we transmit it or do we transform it?Because the mirror in which we might see ourselves as God
see us gets dimmer and dimmer when the pain of being human is transmitted to us
and not transformed.As our own
sin and brokenness begins to be a lens through which we view ourselves and
others the mirror grows dimmer. And then the pain of not knowing who we really
are becomes transmitted through all the things Paul describes: arrogance,
impatience, unkindness, envy, selfishness.It can be a desperate cycle based on something as simple as
the truth my mother once spoke “honey, bullies just bully out of their own hurt
inside as though they have to spread it”.But this is true of so many things when we think about
it.And I think what Paul was
saying to his little church plant gone bad was: stop hurting each other.Stop transmitting your hurt and
sin.

Because from that state of being loved poorly, feeling
undeserving and then loving poorly in return, we do some stuff
that’s…unhelpful.

This
letter to the church in Corinth wasn’t providing a sentimental reading for
their weddings,it was a smack
down.They were bickering and dysfunctional
and competitive.Some of them had
some mad skills but were being asses about it, as though being church together
had become sort of a competitive sport.They were being petty and prideful and ridiculous.

They
didn’t know who they were and Paul was trying to remind them.And he told them who they were - not by
telling them about history or biology or sociology - but by telling them about love.
Not
the emotion of Love. Not the sentiment of Love. Not the romance of Love.
Because honestly I have yet to see a Hallmark card with I love you so much
that I will endure you.Or, My love for you bears all your things.

But Paul writes of Love as origin.Love as source.Love as God, and God as Love.This Love has really nothing to do with
feeling nice.It’s actually not
about feelings at all, it’s about truth.It’s about the truth of who we are through the eyes of a God who knows
us fully.

This love described by Paul isn’t mushy and
sentimental.It’stough and unwilling to yield. This love
which is patient and kind and isn’t rude or boastful and is self-giving and all
that….here’s what is scary about this kind of love:you can’t manipulate it.There is no amount of weight loss, piety, personality management, big
smiles or strained pretense that can effect this love.And maybe in the absence of
manipulation we stand bare before the eyes of God. This love is found in the gaze of God as God looks upon us
naked and whole. Because this type of love is characterized by the giver not the receiver.Gone are the strivings and manipulations and efforts to make ourselves
more lovable.In the face to face
Gaze of the beloved we are known because we are loved.We aren’t loved because we are known.
…that leads again to trying to gussy ourselves up to be lovable.

We are known
by God because we are loved by God.Think about that.The truth
of who we were before any pain and hurt was transmitted to us by those who are
hurt and in pain…before we forgot our song we were loved.

Paul says For now we see in a mirror,
dimly, but then we will see face to face.For now we manipulate our selves and our image and our
loved ones and see only dimly.Now
we gaze in the mirror and see only part of who we are and even then the image
is reversed.Butwe have the promise that in the
fullness of time we will see face to face with God.Because, Paul writes, now I know only in part; then I will
know fully, even as I have been fully known.

The truth of who you are is found in the
eyes of God, not the eyes of the world.It is the love of God who created this world and called it Good….it is
the love of a God who brought the Israelites out of slavery, who fed Ruth and
Naomi, who walked among us as Jesus of Nazareth, it is the love of the God
who knit you together in your mother’s womb that gets to tell you who you are.Nothing
else. Not the media, not a family who wishes you were different, and not even
yourself.Only the God who
knows and loves you fully can tell you who you are. And this is true of
everyone – the good the bad and the boring.

In the Movie Dead Man Walking sister Helen Prejean
offered pastoral care to a despicable murderer.He was an unrepentant, wretched man.Yet her faith in a loving God allowed
her, moments before his execution, to say to him "I want the last face you
see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this
thing. I'll be the face of love for you."

I
think Paul might be telling us to be the face of love for each other. When we know that we are loved by God
in the fullness of God’s knowledge of us we are free to live in this love. Free to transmit the love of Christ in
a hurting world. Free to see
ourselves and others as God sees us. Not because we are good, but because we
are loved. And seeing just a
glimpse, wanting it, moving toward it, brings us closer to what is promised to
us forever: that we will see God, who is love, face to face. Amen

I will not keep silent. Says the prophet Isaiah. I will not rest, he says, until the promises of God are fulfilled.

My family and I returned from vacation Tuesday to news reports of the devastation in Haiti. I, like all of you, listened in shock to the reports of 10s of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands left without shelter, without food, without family. And within hours everyone realized…and on top of it all, there’s no running water. Knowing this was going to be on everyone’s hearts and minds I thought to myself “I have to preach Sunday I wonder what the Gospel text is …” when I realized it was the wedding at Cana I thought Great. Jesus at a big party making sure the wine flows freely. No one wants to hear that today. Not today. Nobody wants to hear a quaint little miracle story about how generous God is when poorest country in this hemisphere lays in even greater waste than it already did on Monday. Nobody wants to hear of an abundance of wine when people on the streets of Haiti are thirsty. Who dares speak of a party when our cantor Drew is mourning his friend Ben who died in a collapsed building in Port au Prince? When thousands of mothers are mourning their children?

This week’s events bring with them a lot of questions about God, and none of them have to do with parties. One atheist blog I read this week sneeringly used the earthquake to make a case against believing in God at all. The writer implying that he could not believe in a God who would inflict such suffering on so many people, which made me admit that according to that definition I must be an atheist too because I don’t believe in that God either. But after reading the wedding in Cana story over and over again this week I realized that I think Mary, the distraught mother of our Lord , might just be the key to seeing how this text speaks to our mourning and confusion and the death and suffering this week has brought to so many.Our Gospel text for today has what sounds to us to be a rather abrupt and somewhat awkward interaction between Jesus and his mother. They’re at a wedding when Mary looks to her son and says the wine has run out. “Woman” Jesus says to his mother seemingly dismissive and perhaps even disrespectful, “my hour has not yet come” To which Mary is like oh yeah? too bad. Ok she didn’t really say that, but she did simply turn to the servant and said “do whatever he tells you”

Mary tugs at the shirt of God and says I will not keep silent. I will obey you and I will tell others to obey you but I will not keep silent. People are thirsty. See, In John’s gospel Mary is not the young virgin pondering sweet things in her heart. In John’s Gospel Mary is not surrounded by singing angels. She is never even mentioned by name. She is simply “the mother of Jesus” And she shows up exactly twice in the entire book. So Mary stands here in a long line of prophets who have not stayed silent. The prophet Mary stands and says Lord, we’ve run out of wine and people are thirsty.And Jesus hears her. So Jesus does this crazy thing: He could have filled the actual wine jugs up with water to be turned to wine. That would have been the logical miracle (if there is such a thing). Instead, Jesus takes 6 ceremonial purification jars and has THOSE filled with water to turn into wine. Purification Jars used in his own religion, the religion he grew up in the religion of his own family. Jesus transforms this purification water into the wine of a new creation, the wine of a radical new family.

They are thirsty says his mother. And Jesus responds. But he responds in an almost embarrassingly excessive way. 180 gallons. Surely that’s too much. But that’s how Jesus is. 180 gallons of fine wine which…go back and check…is not called a miracle in John but a sign. It’s a sign of what God is doing in Jesus, namely that the very abundance of this gift means that maybe it’s not meant only for you and me. I mean we can try and keep 180 gallons of wine for ourselves but it will just become something we like to call “vinegar” unless it’s shared. In Jesus God is reconciling all creation to God’s self, not just his own religion and his own people, something today we might call “having really bad boundaries”

I think this is why Mary is called “woman”. He refused to abide by society or religion’s definitions of good and bad and pure and impure and family and stranger and who is in and who is out. His own mother is another woman, Like every other woman, every suffering mother.So, Mary only shows up twice in John’s Gospel and both times her son calls her “woman. “ Once is here at the wedding when she refuses to be silent because people are thirsty. The other is when she stands at the foot of the cross. She watches as her son and her Lord hangs innocent from a cross with the weight of the world’s suffering tearing his very flesh.

This is our God. Not a distant judge cruelly indifferent to our pain and not some monster causing calamity, but a God who weep. A God who suffers not only for us but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can we do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. God does not initiate suffering…God transforms it.

It is suffering transformed which we see on the cross when again Christ calls his mother “woman” and initiates an adoption between her and the beloved disciple. This is the new kinship we all share. A kinship in which our identity is not based on country, blood, or religion but on our belovedness as God’s children.

That passage in John reads like this:

standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, “I am thirsty.”

I am thirsty he says. I am not watching this from a distant heaven. Jesus says I too am thirsty.

As we hear the cry of our Hatian brothers and sisters let us discern the other voice we hear with them…that of Christ saying I am thirsty.

The reports that came in that first 24 hours following the quake said that When night fell on the streets of Port AU Prince people were singing hymns and psalms. Blessed be God, they sang. People were singing praises to God amidst their entire world destroyed. Pat Robertson is wrong by the way. There is no reason for this destruction – but there IS meaning. And this meaning is to be found as we again become the human family of God’s new creation without country, religion, boundary or race to divide us. In this moment to the extent that we take up the responsibility of a mother caring for her son, a son for his mother,….In this moment to the extent that we act like Jesus and love and care for those suffering from the earthquake as if they are our own beloved family, we are all Haiti.

So we, with Mary, tug on the shirt of God and say we have run out Lord. We need wine. Good wine. Enough for all, flowing over. We too will not keep silent. We will join with the family of God in the singing of hymns and psalms. And then we will listen to Jesus’ command and fill some jars with water for the thirsty.Blessed be God.Amen

Taking inspiration from Rev. Martin Poole and Beyond's Beach Hut Advent Calendar House for All Sinners and Saints undertook to make an Advent Calendar over the days of Advent. Different people in the community made a "day" out of shoe (and other similar sized) boxes. We displayed them on shelves hung between ladders. It was fun to see our calendar grow with new scenes each week.

1Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights!

2Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host!

3Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars!

4Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!

5Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created.

6He established them forever and ever; he fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.

7Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,

8fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!

9Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!

10Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

11Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!

12Young men and women alike, old and young together!

13Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven.

14He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to him. Praise the Lord!

Well, To the rest of the world Christmas is over. Empty champagne bottles fill the recycling cans. Dry needles of long dead trees fall to the floor of our living rooms. We’ve stretched both our pants and our patience to the limits as Auden writes in his Christmas oratorio which we will hear later, “There are enough leftovers to do, warmed up for the rest of the week. Not that we have much of an appetite, having drunk such a lot – stayed up so late – attempted, quite unsuccessfully, to love all our relatives, and in general grossly overestimated our powers.”

The straining push to make the parties, buy the stuff, bake the goods, entertain the people, love the relatives, avoid the conflicts and enjoy the holidays is now a clamoring memory fading into our exhausted minds. And as everyone around is returning gifts and packing leftovers into Tupperware and driving relatives to the airport, praying the flights for Duluth are actually departing….as everyone else is taking down their decorations we are finally, finally singing Joy to The World. Having waited and longed and anticipated for 4 weeks of Advent we finally are in the season of Christmas even as everyone else has decidedly moved on. But I think the church is at its best when the church is odd. And to be lustily singing Christmas carols on December 27th is indeed odd and pleasingly inappropriate.

But this whole Jesus thing started with inappropriate singing if we listen for it closely. Over the din of sales clerks and Salvation army bell ringers and screaming children on sugar highs and roasting chestnuts and endless rounds of We wish you a merry Christmas it’s easy to miss the sudden sound of

a great company of the heavenly host appearing with the angel, praising God and singing, "Glory to God in the highest, peace to God’s people on Earth."

Suddenly, a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel at the birth of the Christ and praised God. I like to think that this was one of those times when they burst forth in songs of praise even though they were supposed to keep hidden. These heavenly beings were supposed to just witness things from the removed, quiet distance of their heavenly home and yet before they even realized what sort of protocol they were violating, they stumbled through the curtain from backstage and without realizing they were even doing it…started singing praises to God.

Which makes me wonder…why? I mean I can see why humanity would praise God for moving into the neighborhood in such a radical way as to be made human, We quite naturally sing praises about the one who brings God to humanity and humanity to God … but the angels and host of heaven? What are they getting out of the deal? Why are they praising God? Isn’t God going to be, I don’t know, out of the office more now? Wouldn’t the angels resent the whole thing? All through this garish Holiday season we sing about how the angels sing…. but why? I mean what had God done for them? On what basis did these hosts of heaven and angels praise God. Because there has to be a reason, right? The reasons for praising God seem to fall into two categories: 1. We’re in church. or 2. God has hooked me up somehow.

Psalm 148, which we just sang, bids all of creation to praise God and the list is a little weird. There are the angels and host of heaven which one might expect but then the Psalmist adds that the sun moon and stars praise the Lord. Yet it gets better. For those among us who think praising God is an occasional event relegated to church on Sunday or gratitude for getting a raise at work, this Psalm is not helpful. Because the list of God praisers goes on to include fire, hail, snow, fog….sea monsters. The praise of God comes forth also from flying things, creeping things, mountains, hills, wild beasts….cattle. THEN and only then do we get to human beings who, if you are keeping track, come after the cattle.

One commentator I read this week asked “What keeps us from praising like the Psalmist?” And I thought, What keeps us from praising like the sea monsters and cattle? What keeps us from praising like hail and creeping things? If these can praise God then maybe the reasons for praise are something other than a) we’re in church or b) God has hooked me up.

We imagine praise is relegated to a certain time and place and form. But not so with the cattle. The sea creatures and creeping things and hail and wind do not relegate their praise of God to an hour on Sunday. Or when they have a really great day. They can’t. They simply are who God created them to be and do what God created them to do. The way in which creeping things of the Earth praise God is to simply creep on the Earth. The creatures simple praise the creator by being creatures. Their being is in itself praise of the source of their being.

If we think that the goal of the Christian life is to transcend our animal nature and become spiritual beings then this Psalm and frankly the incarnation itself is problematic. Richard Rhor said that "most of the world is so tired of 'spiritual people.' We would be happy just to meet some real human beings. They always thrill the heart, just as Jesus did." Our spirituality is the gift given us in the imago dei…bring created in the image of God. Our spirituality is given to us by merit of our being the beloved of God. To praise God then is to live fully into the dignity of being God’s children…of being simply human.

Perhaps to praise God is to simply look to nothing and no one else to know who we are. We are the creatures and God the creator. In the end, praising God is not, as I suggested a few weeks ago, to sycophantically stroke God’s ego because God has low self-esteem and created a cosmic entourage to remind God how great he is. I’m pretty sure the cattle aren’t doing this. I think the difference is that the cattle don’t get their identity or sense of worth outside of God. Sea creatures aren’t looking to the Dow Jones or their Body Mass Index to know their value. Their value, as ours, rests in their createdness by God.

What do the angels and hail and cattle know that we don’t? What is doxological living? Perhaps it is to tune out the cacophony of other messages and for our hearts to sing of only God. Amidst the empty praise of dangerously misguided celebrity culture doling out warm admiration for what is but greed and vanity we do the odd thing of praising God; not for hooking us up with a Grammy or a cute boyfriend or a sweet parking space, but for being God. And we praise God for being God by simply being God’s children with all of the inherit dignity that implies. All other identities melt away. I think this is what is allowed by the birth of Christ, the one who brings God to us and us to God. as the beloved carol states He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

39In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." 46And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. 54He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, 55according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."\

Again this Wednesday we joined the broader church in singing vespers, the evening prayer which always includes Mary’s song, The Magnificat. We joined Christ’s church and Christ’s mother in singing about the wondrous things God has done in blessing us and in casting the mighty from their thrones and in feeding the hungry and sending the rich away emptySome of you know that the church I went to in High School, and where my parents still attend, is a very theologically and socially conservative congregation in Centennial. It’s, suburban, white, very upper middle class, and privileged. Very privileged. Well a few years ago, over 10 years after becoming a Lutheran and singing the Magnificat in Vespers countless times and really loving how radical it was, I visited my parent’s church and was amazed to see in the worship folder that the closing song was The Magnificat. All through the service I kept thinking “I can’t believe that this wealthy suburban evangelical church is going to sing Mary’s song of the poor being fed and the rich being left hungry”. Finally the moment came. The congregation sang a praise music setting of…and I can’t make this up…the first half of the magnificat. They proudly sang a nice praise song based on the Magnificat about how their soul magnifies the Lord who had looked with favor on them and that generations will call them blessed because the mighty one has done great things and holy is his name.” And then the song ended. I was speechless. Well, not really. As I shook the preachers hand on the way out I said that it was theologically irresponsible to allow a profoundly privileged congregation to sing only the first half of Mary’s song.

They may not know what the Magnificat is about, but I do. I felt pretty proud of that.

Progressives see Mary’s song a bit differently. Mary isn’t a docile picture of obedience singing about how great it is to be pregnant. Mary is singing of nothing less than complete overturning of the social and economic order. She’s basically a first century female Che Guevara calling for revolution. There’s a reason why the magnificat is said to of terrified the Russian Czars. Because, the message is that if you find yourself rich and powerful then… watch out! This young little Jewish girl is not singing about a whole lot of good news for you. But the poor…their time is coming because now the poor will be the rich and the rich will be the poor.

The liberals understand the Magnificat and feel pretty proud of that.

But this explanation sounds more like retribution than redemption. Because when the oppressed become the oppressors then the oppression hasn’t actually gone away. It’s a zero sum gain. It’s the exact same play with the same plot and the same ending…just with a different cast. What Mary sings of is not an endless cycle of retribution, but a total dismantling of the entire system. The child she bears is not coming to make the oppressed the oppressors. He is coming to disrupt the whole notion of oppression itself. And the way in which God accomplishes this in the birth of Christ is the same way in which God accomplishes this in the death of Christ: namely vulnerable love. This divinely vulnerable love is the only way out of our cycle of power and oppression.

This all makes it a bit tough to pull of being prideful about knowing what the Magnificat is really about. For me or for anyone else. Ironically, to be prideful about understanding the Magnificat is to not understand it at all. Perhaps it is pride itself which causes the rich to be sent away empty. And not because God doesn’t want us fed, but because we don’t realize that we’re hungry. Maybe in Mary’s song the wealthy are sent away empty because we simply don’t need God. We’ve got plenty of daily bread and seem to be able to handle most stuff that comes our way. But the truly hungry… carry none of these illusions of self-sufficiency. It is our hunger which God feeds, not our fullness. The rich are left hungry because there is no entry point for God.

Mary’s song is perhaps not about being proud of being chosen by God and perhaps it’s not about pride in the coming reordering of things when she and those like her will finally be the ones in power. Maybe the Magnificat is about the entry points of God’s vulnerable love. The cracks into which the light of the Christ enters our hearts and enters our lives and enters our world. The entry points of God’s vulnerable love are not our pride and power and self-sufficiency and wealth, but our need for God…our hunger for God.It reminds me of the song of another prophet… Leonard Cohen Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat's how the light gets in.

It’s the cracks that allow the light to enter. These cracks in ourselves and in the world are entry points for God’s redeeming work . The absurdity of Mary: Her insignificance, her poverty, her unwed femaleness, was the perfect crack for the light of Christ to enter. And her kinswoman Elizabeth, this inappropriately pregnant old lady from the hill country was the perfect crack into which the messenger of the light of God to enter.

So the very real suffering in our lives and in our world which makes us question if God is really just, if God is really present, and if the Magnificat is still singable…this suffering is right where God chooses to hang out. Ever since there have been men and women and children who weren’t allowed the dignity of heaven’s children, God has been right there, right next to them, preparing a way out of all that darkness. God has always been like this, and the ones like Mary, the ones who see that truth plainly, finally have all of the world’s power. But this power isn’t the kind we create for ourselves…it’s the power of brokenness and humility. Power-over and retribution and vengeance and oppression be damned. This vulnerable love of God is what claims us and what gives us hope, real hope, in a way that noting else can. Even amidst a world in which we are all very aware that the mighty sit on thrones and the hungry are still hungry we can sing her song. Because Mary doesn’t sing the Magnificat out of ignorance. I’m certain that the reality of empire and oppression and poverty and the abject powerlessness of her very self in her very context was not lost on the mother of our Lord. Quite the opposite. I think she knew. She knew that because of her lowliness and poverty and insignificance - because of this and not in spite of this that God was and is doing an entirely new thing. Never had the poor been so exalted than for God to slip into their skin insistently blessing the whole world in a radical way. She knew you simply can’t speak of such things. They have to be sung.

(blog post script: things change a lot in a few years. My parent's church has a new brilliant young preacher who really loves The Gospel. We meet together once a month with a couple other pastors to talk about our work and our preaching. If someone had told me 5 years ago that one day I would be in a colleague group with my parent's Church of Christ preacher I would have laughed like Sarah. But God is good and not a little mischievous. Anyway, we met this week. He too is preaching on the Magnificat today. The whole thing. May it be a Gospel Word for his people. Amen.)

Luke 1:68-79

68“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
69He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David,
70as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
72Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant,
73the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us
74that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear,
75in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
76And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.
78By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us,
79to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Last Spring at our church retreat Stuart and Krista and Jim and Andie and perhaps some of you busted out in what felt like an interminable Broadway musical sing along. It was cute. Kind of. But honestly it was a little annoying too. Because I had never seen Avenue Q or Wicked. And hearing people sing show tunes number for musicals I’ve never seen is just not really that fun for me. But then they sang Take me or Leave Me from the musical Rent and well, that was wonderful. Because I’ve seen Rent. I could picture the characters and know what is happening in the story arch when I hear the song. I know the story, so that the song really means something to me…. whereas a song from Avenue Q is just …another show tune I’ve never heard.

This is why I am preaching today on the psalm we just chanted. Zechariah’s song. The Benedictus.

Recently I was asking a new House person what they thought of worship here. “It’s great”, she said…”Because I’ve always wanted my life to be like a musical where you never know when people are gonna just start singing…and your church is kinda like that”.

The first couple chapters of Luke’s Gospel are kinds like that too – a part of the Bible which reads like perhaps it were written by Andrew Loyd Webber because Characters just bust out singing all over the place. The Holy catholic and apostolic church has a long history of acting like a musical….mostly in her practice of daily prayer when the church sings the canticles. Like when Elizabeth is visited by Mary she sings a song, now known as the Hail Mary. Then in response Mary sings her song called the Magnificat which we sang Wednesday and is actually sung everyday at vespers, or evening prayer. Simeon, when holding the 8 day old Christ child in his arms fills the temple with his song Called the Nunc Dimittis, which has been sung by countless centuries of the faithful in the daily Compline liturgy; the final prayer before retiring to bed. But the song we sang today belongs to Zechariah, husband to Elizabeth…father to John the Baptist. it’s called the Benedictus, and is a song of freedom sung every day at Lauds, or morning prayer..

And here’s the back-story: His wife Elizabeth had conceived a son in her old age…that’s one the Holy Spirit’s favorite tricks by the way …making old ladies fertile. Anyhow, Zechariah knew this miraculous pregnancy was going to happen because he had been tipped off so to speak. He was doing his priestly duty and burning incense in the temple when the arch angel Gabriel in all his glory appeared before him. Which sounds nice…having angels visit you. But we aren’t talking the little chubby baby angels of bad Hallmark cards…we’re talking a powerful heavenly being who strikes fear in the hearts of everyone he visits. If that were’nt so Gabriel wouldn’t have to start every single conversation with a human with “Oh, don’t be afraid.” The arch angel Gabriel tells Zechariah the craziest thing: that Zechariah’s wife Elizabeth would conceive a son named John who would make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

And instead of just shutting up and nodding his head deferentially… Zecheriah does what I’m pretty sure I would do…he questions the angel’s authority. Zechariah says Um, are you sure because seriously…my wife is Old…how do I know this will really take place?

To which the arch angel says “Cause I said so and I am Gabriel for goodness sake” Then the angel made Zechariah mute until all these things had taken place. It was like a 9 month time-out for Zechariah. He couldn’t talk the entire time which is actually kinda wonderful.

So as his elderly wife’s belly grew large with child he couldn’t say a word. As Elizabeth’s kinswoman Mary visited and told of the child she herself carried and as Zechariah’s child lept in elizabeth’s womb he could not say a word. As the transgressive fecundity of God that would change the entire world grew in the wombs of an old lady and a virgin teenager he could not say a word. It was as though God said “you want to see what I am about? Well then…Shut up. watch and listen”

Maybe we too should take opportunities to just shut up, watch and listen for God’s redemption in forms we least expect to be seeing it. Maybe when our opinions and neurosis and pride and expectations about what the world owes us die down…maybe when we sit in this quiet of Advent we might begin to see where God is quietly and insistantlyt making all things new. Things we don’t perceive until we shut up for awhile. It was a gift really…this muteness of Zechariah’s. Perhaps the fact that he had to silently watch and listen prepared him to burst forth in song when he was finally able to speak. When his tongue was loosened he did not use it to justify himself or defend his position or to yammer on about himself…having been silent and watchful and receptive to the unexpected wonders of God he could not help but sing praise to God when finally he could speak.

This old man holds his new born son and sings of freedom. He blesses God for the ways in which God comes to us to free us. But freedom in this context is characterized not only by justice but also by the ability to worship God. Unfettered and unfiltered relationship between the creator and the creature.

This is true worship. Not vapidly stroking God’s ego as though God has low self-esteem and created us to remind him how great he is. But real worship - which is to see how God always comes down to us… interrupting our lives to insist on our salvation. That’s how God works. Interruption. Just when we get a comfortable thing going and we are humming along God says “that’s adoreable. but I have something else in mind. namely a radical new life for you and for all creation” Just when we are doing all the right stuff God closes our mouths until we see God’s faithfulness and burst out into song. Like Zechariah we become free to worship God. But that freedom comes at a cost. The price we pay for the freedom to worship God is repentance. It’s a little thing really. It’s just the simple matter of admitting that God is a God an well….I am not.

This is real worship. To sing of a God who remembers promises and who sets us free. We too sing of the very God who is not content to simply stand at a distance but insistently draws near to us in an unexpected child and in the waters of baptism and in the bread and wine at the table and in the community of saints who gather around God’s story. Advent is an invitation to identify with all those in the great Musical of the Gospel…all those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, and to carry good news to all those who dwell in darkness, in the shadow of death. Advent is an invitation to be prophets. An invitation to shut up and watch and listen in a real Silent Night until we can Sing like Zechariah that:

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us,to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Church music was my first language. I was raised in a church tradition that did not allow musical instruments in worship. Instead, 3 times a week for 16 years I sat in a congregation that sang better than most choirs; basically kids raised in the Church of Christ can sing harmonies before we can speak.As a teenager I left the church. I would not be part of another Christian community for 10 years and did not miss most of what I left; but I missed the music. I missed joining my voice with others and making something beautiful and transcendent. Becoming a Lutheran at age 26, I fell in love with the ancient liturgy (singing the prayers and praise of the faithful as the church has done for countless generations). But the hymn singing? Well, it may have been ok...but mostly I heard the organ. Occasionally people would sing out but not in harmony and more often than not they seemed to make a little sound that came meekly out of their mouth and promptly fell right in front of their hymnal. But sometimes during a communion hymn, the organist would drop out and the congregation would sing without accompaniment and it was glorious. In those moments people sang much differently than they had when the organ was playing...they stepped up and sang out and even picked out some harmonies. And the emerging churches I visited were no better, often having a band playing music written by one of their members. With unfamiliar singer/song writer music (not conducive to congregational singing to begin with) and nothing but lyrics on a screen, I seldom heard people really singing. While I have deep respect for the impulse behind communities writing their own music I have this conviction that I cannot shake: I prefer for congregational singing to be the primary musical expression in church. The experience of creating music in worship solely from the bodies of those present is one which cannot be matched by listening to someone else make the music for everyone else which the congregation can sing along with if they feel like it,as though singing is the optional acompanyment to the instruments. Now, before I get all kinds of comments about how I'm wrong let me say that I fully understand this to be a minority opinion and that some churches with instruments sing well. I am not saying everyone should be doing it like we do. But singing is our birthright as human being and since the advent of recorded music we have lost this essential part of what it means to be human. We have sadly left music to the professionals. People used to gather and sing together in each other's homes as evening entertainment. But why sing somewhat poorly if you can listen to a professional make much better music? Take Me Out To The Ballpark is about the only public singing we have left; unless you count karaoke. When I set out to start House for All Sinners and Saints I had a few non-negotiables. One was that this was to be a singing congregation. And we are. Visitors are amazed at how 40 some odd people in an old church can create such a beautiful rich sound. They're often amazed too that (mostly) young people are singing the old hymns of the church with such passion. The result isn't always beautiful though - sometimes it's a bit shaky, sometimes it's a bit awkward. (It helps that our motto is "We're anti-excellance, pro-participation") But often, really often, our a capella singing makes my heart soar because when we add our voices together in harmony we are not just creating music...we are creating community.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.

Gospel: John 11:32–44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

And God will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; God will swallow up death forever.

There’s a beautiful concept within Celtic thought called the Thin Places. These are places where the veil between heaven and earth, human and divine, temporal and eternal, the now and the not yet is especially thin Where we experience that which is beyond linear time and the limits of our 5 senses. A thin place can be an actual place like the mountain tops and deserts of the biblical prophets or it can be an event like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one or for myself, the 4-part harmonic a capella singing of Amazing Grace. These are the moments when we who live this Earthly life catch a glimpse of God’s promised future which is actually already happening for those who have passed on. These are moments that feel as if we can actually taste the rich food and well aged wine of the prophet Isaiah’s vision. The feast of God which offers us not only a killer menu but the promise of having the shroud of tears and suffering lifted when God swallows up death forever. This is the kingdom of God which Jesus ushered in and while we are yet to experience it in it’s fullness, it’s breaking in all around us. But it doesn’t always feel like that. Like when we experience the very real and inevitable pain of death.

When Jesus himself experienced the very real pain of death we read that Jesus wept. God cried. God became man, made friends and then those friends died and he cried. Jesus friend Lazarus was dead. And not just kinda dead. In the Jewish tradition the soul hangs out near the body for 3 days and Lazarus has been dead for 4. So he’s dead dead. And his distraught sister says to Jesus “if you were here my brother would not have died”. I love how honest and maybe a little angry she is as she looks at her so called friend this so called messiah and says thanks for nothing. We are dying here are where were you? She’s right though because who hasn’t felt that? …where is God when our brothers are dying? Where is God when we hurt so bad from the sting of death that the loss of it all fills up spaces we used to be able to breath in. Grief sucking up oxygen like a vacuum. leaving us breathless and vacant. If Jesus were here my people wouldn’t die. So, greatly disturbed in spirit, Jesus asks where they had lain his friend and they say “come and see” and it’s then….then he cries. “Come and see” is exactly what he had said to them. At the very beginning of John’s Gospel he had called to his would-be followers and said to them “come and see” and so much had happened since then. So they say to Jesus the very thing he had said to them like a thin place between the beginning of his ministry and this moment. But they are telling him to come and see death. Come, Jesus, and see the thing that ends life. Jesus’ friends say Come and See…this is what being human looks like God. He was for that moment their disciple as he follows them to the grave and the very stench of death - the shroud that covers everything temporal. For to be a living being in history is to be characterized by death and separation. And for this Jesus weeps and later for this Jesus dies. He dies. As in dead, dead. and in three days he rises. he lives. as in lives, lives. In his own resurrection Christ defeats death and separation but here in the raising of Lazarus before he defeats death for good he just gives it a really good slap in the face. As though God saying here’s what I think of you death. As though God is saying here’s what I think of separation. As though God is saying “Death will not separate you from me because I will not for even a moment live without you.” This event was nothing if not a thin place. God lifting the sheet between the worlds. God reaching into the stench of death to claim us as God’s own. This resurrection event was a glimpse of God’s death swallowing future. And that’s why I started thinking of this Lazarus story as the first liturgy. See, reading this passage this week I was reminded of a story I’ve told you before of what my worship professor at Luther seminary said about liturgy. He asked on the very first day of class “what is it that happens in worship” “We pray for the whole world” one guy said “we praise God” answered someone else. And when we had exhausted the obvious Dr. Teig looked at us and said. “Actually, we raise the dead.”

So that day in Bethany was perhaps the first worship service. The living wounded gathered in love and expectancy as the people pray, hear Christ preached and are raised from the dead in a glimpse of what is to come in the fullness of God’s time. This was the first worship service. It takes 11 more verses in John until they get to the meal part though… I guess the passing of the peace and the announcements took a long time….but the fact is that when they gathered to mourn their dead that day in Bethany they glimpsed the time of God in which all things are made new. The shroud was lifted enough for them to see God’s future in which death is swallowed up forever. That day as Jesus slapped death in the face they got a sneak peek at God’s time slipping into our time. Like a thin place between the now and the not yet. Like a thin place between us and our dead. And then Jesus commanded Lazarus’ community to unbind him.

The community was commanded to unbind the death garment from their brother As God is saying “Death will not separate you from me because I will not for even a moment live without you.”And we too participate in this thin place between our time and God’s time, between us and our dead through Word, Sacrament, Community, because in all these we are joined to the whole Body of Christ regardless of whether or not they are historically present. But that’s the way it is within the mystical body of Christ where all times are present at all times. Today as we sing hymns are hear the Word and receive the Eucharist we stand with Mary Magdalen and Frances of Assisi as real as we stand with Stuart Sanks and Victoria Shotwell and as real as we stand with those who are not yet even born. All the saints of all times join in the heavenly chorus singing the glory of God. We acknowledge this every week as we sing the sanctus. When with all the choirs of angels, with the church on Earth and the hosts of heaven we praise God’s name as holy holy holy. We like Lazarus need this word of God to call us out of the tomb daily to live as resurrected people, maybe still stinky from the grave, in this perverse hope of a God who dies only to be raised, who weeps for our suffering while offering provision of God’s own self for our wholeness. We are all the Mystical body of Christ gathering as the saints always have to sing the glory of God to hear Christ preached and to eat at God’s Feast that is now and is also yet to come. This, my friends, is the thin place called the communion of Saints where with all the faithful of all time we tell of the death defeating God who will not for a moment live without you. So as the funeral liturgy says, even as we go down to the grave we make our song Alleluia, Alleluia

17As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 18Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" 20He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." 21Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." 22When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. 23Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" 24And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." 26They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?" 27Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible." 28Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you." 29Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, 30who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life. 31But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."

What must I do to inherit eternal life, says the rich man to Jesus. Which is a little weird since in family inheritance the big thing you have to do is basically try to still be alive when the other guy dies, right? but it’s a question that, in it’s utter cluelessness, reminds us that inheritance is more about the wealth and generosity of the one who is giving than the worthiness and efforts of the one receiving.

The rich man in his entitlement and comfort and confidence in his ability to obey the commandments comes and says to Jesus…if you could just give me a personal salvation management program, that’d be awesome, I can take it from there. So Jesus looks at him, loves him and then totally freaks him out. Ok, Sell all you have and give it to the poor. Shocking.So, this is the same Jesus who just a chapter ago was telling us to cut off our own hands and feet and yet we are shocked when he implies we too should cut off our bank accounts?

How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God says Jesus. How hard it is for we who are self-reliant and smug to accept how utterly dependent we are on God. How hard it is for those of us who don’t actually need God to see God. How hard it is for us for whom comfort: material, financial and physical insulates us from the daily bread reality of our creator. How hard it is for those of us who dedicate ourselves to being good social justice activists to surrender to a God who is likely unimpressed with our busyness. How hard it is for the powerful to see life abundant in giving away power. How hard it is to die and be re-born.So who can enter the kingdom on their own? Who among us has done the hard things necessary to inherit eternal life? Who among us has sold all we have and given it to the poor? Who among us has…as the reading from Mark a couple weeks ago suggested…who has hacked off our own feet and hands to ensure our salvation?If we try to read the discipleship texts from Mark as a personal salvation manual then we imagine that it is we ourselves must cut off our hands and feet, gouge out our own eyes, give away all our possessions and shrink our camel-sized selves down to needle eye size. But in fact it tends to be God who does this for us...who prunes us, feeds us, cuts us and our bank accounts down to size and shapes us. It tends to be God and not us who does the impossible.

This is how it happened with the disciples. The disciples had no personal plan or technique for following Jesus. When the disciples were called it looked more crazy than planned. God slipped into skin and walked past them calling out ‘follow me’. dropping their nets they didn’t count the cost, make a plan and follow the steps. There wasn’t time…they just got swept up into the radical love of a God who comes to us in flesh and blood. Everything they had known is changed. What they had held dear and clung to was cut away when they dropped those nets. And you know folks thought they were crazy. But that’s what happens. Crazy things go on when we are part of this Kingdom of God. For instance, I never had any desire to befriend evangelical pastors. If I’d tried to figure out on my own how to get saved and Jesus had said Nadia, for your personal salvation management program you must become friends with Evangelical pastors. If Jesus had said you must preach at their churches, collaborate on a prayer book and develop fondness and respect for people whose theology and worship looks like its from another planet entirely. If Jesus HAD said this to me I would go away shocked and grieving for I have many snotty opinions about these people which I’m honestly as comfortable with as that rich guy was with his wealth. I am perfectly happy not liking evangelicals I’m also quite happy to not like Missouri Synod Lutherans, especially – for instance- ones who have radio shows in which they tear apart my sermons and basically call me a heretic for being a woman pastor. Who is exactly the guy I met yesterday at the conference where I was speaking, presumably he was there to get more fuel for his little radio show. I knew he was there and I did not want to engage with him. Why? He spend an entire half hour of a radio show picking apart my sermon on the ELCA Churchwide assembly. I had never met him, but I don’t like him. Yet God paid this very little attention yesterday when, despite us both, my LCMS detractor – slash – conservative Christian radio host and I had a 30 minute long conversation which was filled with grace and honesty and in which twice he shed tears. We spoke of how desperate we both are for the gospel. Desperate enough to hear it even from each other. It’s weird that beautiful conversation happened at all since it’s basically impossible.And yet God went ahead and did this for me—Put me and my enemy face to face yesterday. And in the past 6 months God has sent me a bunch of Evangelicals to be my brothers and sisters, to have meals with, to love. This is what happens when God does the impossible and, like the disciples, we get swept up into it. Our Small Catechism says that I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort come to my Lord Jesus or believe in him but the Holy Spirit has called me though the Gospel and enlightened me with the spirit’s gifts. The impossible is what happens when, the Holy Spirit calls us through the gospel and enlightens us with the Spirit’s gifts. I believe that by my own understanding or effort I cannot sell all I have and give it to the poor. I believe by my own understanding or effort I cannot have beautiful collaborative collegial relationships with Evangelicals, or have grace-filled conversations with my enemies. For me this is impossible, for you this is impossible,…for God, not so much.So like the rich man…what must we do to inherit eternal life? Still be alive after the other guy dies. In other words in this life of discipleship – we will die and be reborn again and again in the death and resurrection of Christ as God sweeps us up again and again into the crazy impossible. So watch those bank accounts brothers and sisters, and those snotty opinions, and your so-called enemies and those plans and management programs. Because seriously….who knows what crazy thing’s gonna happen.